Pelgo 14
by thesalmonskin
Summary: The Flood left Fred Nelson, a high-tech Seattle biochemist, high and dry on Guest Pelgo 5 with the body plan for a plant that could soothe the dispute between the Founders and Guests. Little does he know that his plant will only make things worse. T for graphic violence, harsh language, suggestive themes. BRINK belongs to Bethesda and Splash Damage.
1. Prologue: At Sea

The sun beat down with a merciless uncaring on the little, lightly covered boat as its aging engine sputtered uselessly, pushing it, inch by inch, towards its final goal.

_It's time to face facts_, the Skipper thought to himself as he ambled towards the supply cabinet.

The aforementioned cabinet had three old-school hand-smithed locks, each made separately with three different keys. Each of those keys, at journey's start, had been given to a different crewmember. The Skipper had one, the Engineer had another, and the Sergeant had a third.

Until they ate him.

He had died of sunstroke and dehydration. If it weren't for the fact that he hadn't any water in his body for the last three days, he would have been moaning with fever. Instead, as the life left his eyes, fading from inflamed feverishness to gray, cool apathy, and finally to the glossy stare of death, his mouth had remained open in a silent scream, drier than dust. He hadn't even had the energy to close it.

So, out of mercy, on the fourth day, they relieved him of his submachine gun, shot him twice in the head, and then proceeded to clumsily butcher his body with the imprecision of the delirious and dehydrated. They fed the punters on board with what little meat they were able to carve from the Sergeant's bones. Where it came from was perhaps the ultimate elephant in the room, an unspeakable crime in which every man, woman, and child aboard that boat were made complicit in by each bite of the meat. The tension hanging in the air that day had spoken of cruel acceptance, and a general spirit of _if we have to, you might be next on the menu. Time to start cutting the straws..._

So, those facts:

They had thirty-six liters of water. Or, well, up until the Sergeant had taken ill, they _had_ had thirty-six liters of water. They had wasted twenty-six of their precious bottles on him, hoping for a miraculous recovery. Instead, he had taken twenty-six liters of water with him to the grave. Now, with ten left, the survivors were placing capped water bottles in the most sunlit areas of the boat, hoping to distill a few drops from the salty ocean air. It might be possible to make their ten liters last, but they would have to abolish the double ration for the kids, a line that the Sergeant, Engineer, and Skipper had all agreed they wouldn't cross. Funny, how the sea makes you change your mind, no matter how stubborn you may think you are.

Another fact: They were completely out of food, and were living on stashed candy bars and what raw fish they could catch in an umbrella. They had been for a week, and the forced starvation had everyone on edge. The Engineer (who had inherited the worldly possessions of the Skipper) had found himself pointing his submachine gun at the smallest children aboard in defense of his meager rations every other day for the past week.

Perhaps the most shameful and embarassing fact of all, though, was the fact that, though they had packed away an extra fifty-five gallon drum of gasoline, they were nearly dry in terms of fuel. One day, while decanting gas from the drum, the Engineer realized that he had forgotten the funnel. At risk of spilling their precious dinosaur distillates, he rushed back to the supply cabinet. While he was gone, a child mistook the drum's contents for water, and attempted to drink some. He vomited into the tank as his body rejected the substance, and tainted it beyond the ancient outboard's tolerances. The Engineer had gone through three water rations in the exertion of attempting to repair the thing.

They were running out of energy, food, and supplies. Their passengers were dropping like flies, and their moods were, too. It was starting to seem like they would all die, and, in a few months time, their boat would capsize, and there would remain no trace of evidence that the trinity of the Skipper, Engineer, and Sergeant had ever made the valiant effort they had.

They needed a miracle.

They needed the Ark.


	2. Setting the Stage

-The Guest-

The backscattered ocean light flooded the rusty shipping container with a faint, ethereal blue glow as Guest Pelgo 5 slowly awoke from its slumber and rose to the business of the day. Fred eased his legs off his cot and began to massage some feeling into them, feeling the blood rush through his arteries, and relishing the resultant pins-and-needles sensation. He leaned over and checked his raincatcher. A tiny amount, about an ounce, had accumulated through the tube leading into the plastic bottle strapped to his wall. He decanted the rust out of it and drank it in a few calculated sips, then lit a cigarette and took a deep drag as the people of the pelgo began to navigate the narrow avenues and walkways of the container city.

How like Seattle it was, in the last days. Streets were covered in tents and shacks as the salt water inched higher and higher up the slopes, killing off beautiful green grass and mighty trees as it sucked moisture from the fragile plants. The city remained bustling and lively until the last, when the water finally passed the dams and holdfasts and began to swamp Seattle-Tacoma airport. Flights kept leaving until the drag of water on the planes was too much and the last survivors there had to abandon by helicopter, until even the Air Traffic Control tower was covered. Thankfully, there had been dozens of decommissioned aircraft carriers and other various boats, as well as planes ready to be converted to boats, in Seattle, thanks to local industries. They had floated away from the city, converting decks from launch pads to farmsteads, and planes to fishing trawlers.

Fred sighed. Of course, then he had come to the Ark. And the Founders told him 'No'. They turned him and a thousand other people on their aircraft carrier away. Determinedly, they parked the carrier at a Guest pelgo, and it was swiftly dismantled, spare parts stripped, framework repurposed. That night, in retribution, Ark Security had come in the night and disappeared ten Guests, at random. A futile gesture, at best, but it earned an outcry against it all its own.

_It's the thought that counts_, Fred thought to himself, as he felt to his side in the hidden compartment on his desk. The CD's familiar form was still there. He clasped his fingers around it, rubbed the papered side, and then coughed as he began to choke on the acrid, chalky fumes of his cig's filter. He scowled and flicked the cigarette out of his container, then swung fully out of bed, and stretched out to prepare for his morning run.

His sneakered feet pounded through the thick iron oxide 'dirt' on the ground on the main road as he started to run. _I may smoke, but nobody can ever say I'm out of shape, or that I can't breathe when I have to_, Fred thought as he roamed the container city's Ur-like tangle of streets and overpasses, practicing sprints, long distance jogs, and parkour. Always parkour. He had learned it back in Seattle and taken a job teaching it to ArkSec as part of a 'Practical Movement' class. It paid quite well, enough for an extra few water rations and the ability to purchase food from the stores on the opposite side of the wall as the fancy struck him, rather than trading in a food coupon for a hunk of bread and a bowl of salty soup twice a day.

He mantled a small box, then grabbed an adjacent container and swung his legs up over the edge, stood, and leapt the street below, landing in the open short end of an old Maersk container, and continued running down the makeshift hallway formed by a series of containers, and, on occasion, the negative space between them. He made it all the way to the end and swung down onto a ladder covered in plywood, which formed a narrow catwalk, one of several over the narrow strip of water that served as GP5's boat launch. He followed the catwalk across to the old aircraft carrier's deck and sprinted the distance from the edge of the runway to the miniature ATC tower, which was a community center now. It was also where the container city's farmers and technicians kept track of their crops, their yields, experiments, and power generation. Guest Pelgo 5 was well electrified thanks to the still-running Nimitz carrier's reactor belowdecks, which was scheduled to remain running for another twenty years.

"Fred! How was your run?" asked Isadora, the woman who stored and distributed the crops to the various businesses around GP5, as Fred slowed down, stretching and kicking his legs out as he stopped to keep from cramping.

"Great," he said, slightly winded. "How're the farmers?"

"They're doing good. Your ride is gonna be here in a few minutes, so you might wanna hurry out to the launch."

"Thanks, mom. You pack me a lunch?" Fred asked, with a sarcastic grin pinned lopsidedly to his face. She punched him playfully, then hugged him and sent him on his way as an ArkSec boat pulled up to the launch. Fred walked to the edge of the farm deck, then descended the ladder and boarded the boat by its landing craft-like front end. There were a couple of ArkSec gendarmes aboard who looked a bit uncomfortable at the prospect of a Guest on board their lovely, pure-white boat, getting rust residue on the deck, but they would have to suck it up. _I've been taking this shuttle boat for three months now, and will be for the foreseeable future_, Fred thought as the boat slowly left the marina, and roared away at full throttle, its anti-hydroplaning catches digging into the waves to keep the boat's speed even.

Of course, that's the problem with the foreseeable future; human foresight was inherently limited. The Wall was a monument to that.

They passed the immense, checkpointed structure dividing Ark in two without ceremony, but it never ceased to awe Fred, this monument to fear.

Built as the Immigration reached its peak, taxing Ark beyond capacity, the Wall was a structure of steel rebar, concrete, and Arkoral, the 'miracle material' from which most of the Ark was constructed. The Founders had it hastily constructed to ward off the specter of raiding parties of unsatisfied Guests deciding to take food and water by force, and it had permanently alienated Founder and Guest, a physical barrier in addition to the emotional one. For the Founders, it was a line in the sand that they would never cross, a line that allowed them to sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that _we're not like that... that _rabble_._ For the Guests, it was a basic, almost child-psychological statement; _we won't share._ The wedge it drove between them was more than physical. You could almost feel a transition in tension, from anticipation to fear, when you crossed it from Guest to Founder sides.

The boat reached Security Command, just across the water from the Guest pelgos, and docked immediately, the front end's armor plating retracting and extending in different sections to form a ramp into the elevator terminal, where a man processed Fred and gave him a badge that said VISITOR TEACHER - GUEST, then sent him on his way. The class was held in a large gymnasium that Fred had filled with large military-grade crates, civilian detritus, and even a few old Maersk or Hanjin shipping containers. There, using the reconfigurable nature of the room's furnishings, he was able to set up a complicated freerunning trainer course and combat tactics testbed.

His class began to trickle into the room, and he enlisted a few of them to prep for a gymnastics course. Once the room was ready and the majority of the class had arrived, he began to teach.

-The Radical-

Joe Chen sat placidly in the large white swivel chair as banter flew back and forth between the Ark-World Unification Party's representatives, Ark Security's leaders, and the Founder Council. Damning accusations were tossed over his head like sharp stones or arrows as the tension in the room reached fever pitch. Still, Chen said nothing, his large, epicanthally folded eyes half-lidded, his facial expression relaxed, his mouth creased with a slight frown. His eyebrows arched upwards, completing the expression of a man who is equally confused and disappointed.

His mind faded out of its Zen state and back into reality as the argument reached a boil.

"-water rationing _RIGHT NOW!_" one of the AWU councilors on Chen's side of the room shouted at a Founder.

"If we've told you once, we've told you a thousand times-"

"Our people are _DYING_ in the slums because you Founders rock back on your asses and take everything for yourselves!"

"We're giving you all we can! What, do you think Founders' Tower is just some pleasure palace or... or some Garden of Eden?"

"Yes! As a matter of fact, I do!" Chen took a moment to reflect on the stupidity of those arguing. The hotheaded young man to his left was doing a poor job of bringing the Founders and Guests eye to eye. Instead, he was widening the gap between the people of Ark and the owners of it. Chen scowled and heaved his bulky body out of the chair. Instantly, the room fell hushed, and Chen took command of the silence, bending it to his will.

He had had a gift for talking, for inspiring, for leading people, since he was a small boy in the People's Republic of China, before the Flood. He had an intrinsic understanding of problems that bordered on the uncanny, and had a knack for getting other people to want to solve those problems _his_ way, be it with words, example, or reward. Here, he was going to do it again, or at least try his damnedest to salvage what little respect the Founders had for his little political movement.

"Brothers and sisters," he said, his thick Chinese accent and smoky voice distorting his words, turning a low pitch into a growl and a high pitch into a scratchy hiss. Regardless of whether or not you found his voice attractive, one had to give Chen credit; the sound of his voice would have an equal effect on a room whether he were saying _'I'm going to shoot you all now'_ or '_Yes, Santa, I'd like a magical pony for Christmas'_. "I sense my comrades are a bit... radical for your tastes." His vowels were elongated, and ended with a faint trace of an _ah_-sound.

The Founders nodded, and all in the room took their seats. Only a few, on whose parades Chen's intervention had seriously rained, stayed standing, but within a few moments, they seated themselves as well.

"Let us go back to the beginning of the Ark," he said. "During the late 2010's, it began as an eco-research project. A super-sustainable city of the future. Agriculture and aquaculture handled on-board, no waste, no emissions. Perfect." The Founders were nodding; they knew this already. They had known for years. _There's the facts, now I need to lay down the spin_.

"But then, when the seas rose, people began to flee the land and hunt for Ark. And eventually, they found your city, and you welcomed them at first. But then, as more and more showed up, it became clear that you couldn't deal with the needs of tens of thousands of people showing up and demanding food, water, and a roof over their heads.

"I was one of them. I helped build this place. And in return, you Founders gave me and mine a place to stay and bread to break. For a time, things were good. But now, that time is over, and things are just getting worse. The Ark cannot survive on its own; food production is overtaxed and water rationing is becoming so severe that most of the workforce can't physically do their jobs. We have to find land and get help-"

And that was always where that train of thought derailed and burst into flames. The Founders began to scream in outrage until Chen held up a hand and roared for silence, overpowering the room instantly.

"If you will not consider my solution, consider this. While we fight here and tear apart what little unity we still have, we are giving the Ark more time to tear _itself_ apart! We need to reach a consensus soon, and fighting will _not_ help, in any way, shape, or form!"

Chen took his leave after getting in his final word, and the room echoed with his last syllable as he stormed out. The Founders looked shocked at this display of caprice, and the AWU looked shocked at this display of impatience. He could almost feel the thoughts of the people left in the boardroom. _Chen's never like this!_¸they were thinking. _Well, if you can't put aside your differences soon, he'll _start_ being like this._

The elevator ride down Founders' Tower took a while, but it was fleeting in the grand scheme of things. Chen's boat was waiting in a canal outside to take him back to the Guest Pelgos. As it puttered down the canal, careful not to make any wake, Chen looked up at the Tower as it raked the sky, glowing as the Arkoral reflected the light, and contemplated what he had just seen. _That is the third meeting in the past month that has failed miserably. The second that has ended with me storming off. The first that has ended with me realizing that the Founders will _not_ listen to reason._

_It will be war._

_It will _have_ to be war. And if it is, then God help us all._

The Daughter

The boat seemed to be drifting randomly around. Actually, it was drifting randomly around; they were out of gas, and the Engineer and Skipper had resorted to rowing using paddles made from an umbrella. Now, though, the Skipper was dead, and so were her parents. She had seen them all die, seen them gasping as their lungs shriveled from dehydration and their minds failed them. Engineer had taken up both paddles. They were down to three liters of water, including the half-liter they had sucked from the air using empty bottles pumped full of air and held in the blistering sun, and Engineer was distilling the body fluids of Skipper and her parents to hopefully squeeze an extra liter from the dead bodies. The sickening panorama of sunlit blood and urine and bile in liter bottles represented their last hope to sustain their existence further.

Right now, the Engineer was cursing violently at the gas engine as he attempted to pour fuel into it. Nothing would work; though they had kept the tainted gas, the engine wouldn't take it, and they had no way to distill it. She didn't even know if it was possible to distill gasoline.

She leaned back onto the deck of the little boat. She would have cried, but she knew crying was a waste of water, because her tears were made of water, and if she wasted it, she would almost certainly die. She didn't want to die. Sure, she wanted to see her parents again. She believed in Heaven. She thought that if she died, that's where she was gonna go. No, she didn't think; she _knew_. But at the same time, part of her didn't want to. There was a part of her that said '_You didn't survive your parents for nothing. You're going to make it out of this._

_'You're going to do them proud_.'

She wanted to do that, more than anything else she had ever wanted to do. She had wanted to be a princess two years ago. She had wanted to learn how to sing a year after that. Now, she just wanted to make her parents, wherever they were, proud of her. She knew that now, that was all she'd ever want.

And that big, white tower out on the horizon was the place to start.

"Mister Engineer?" she asked. The tall, spare man with the submachine gun slung across his back turned and looked at her, then his eyes widened and he let out a whoop. He dashed over to the railing and splashed some water in celebration.

"What _is_ that?" she asked him.

"That? That's the Ark! That's our new home! We're saved!

"What's the Ark?" Now, she was _very_ confused.

"Didn't your parents ever tell you?" The Engineer busted out the water rations and handed her a full liter. Her eyes widened and she took it.

"Thank you, but isn't this a lot? I mean, what if they don't have any there?"

The Engineer made a funny sound, someplace between a chuckle and a snort. Then, he laughed, a deep laugh from the belly, and took a swig of his water.

"The Ark? Without _water_? Little girl, they're practically the ones who invented desalinization. You'll see, it'll all be better soon."

"Okay," she said, shrugging and taking a drink. If he was going delirious and wasting all their water, then it was his funeral.

Then, the boat rode into an immense shadow, casting it into darkness that seemed Stygian to their malnourished, unadjusted eyes.

"WHOAAA!" the girl shouted, reaching out to touch the huge curve of white material that hung precariously over them. It seemed to glow, catching light and then hurling it away.

"That's the breakwater. It's made of Arkoral. The same stuff they used for the rest of the Ark. This right here," he said, slapping the huge, recurved white arch, "is tougher than concrete. When they grow it, it helps to lower the seas, because it takes CO2 from the atmosphere, and uses it to grow.

"Anyway, chemistry lesson, over," Engineer said, as he sat on the sun-bleached deck of the ship. "What's the first thing you want to do when you get to the Ark?" he asked, as they passed another layer of the breakwater. With each concentric circle, the water got shallower and calmer, until eventually, it took on the coloration of the sand under an isolated atoll. They were approaching the pure white, glowing Arkoral structures of the Founder pelgos.

"I dunno. I guess I'm gonna go ask for some food. I'm really hungry."

"Have a protein bar to keep you tided over?" the Engineer offered, smiling and generous, infused with new hope at the sight of Founders' Tower.

"Sure," she said.

And then, a roaring noise accompanied by the wail of sirens silenced the two as an ArkSec boat pulled up alongside them.

-The Scientist-

The view from Amelie Parker's desk was a sweet one; from this high up, she could see the Ark sprawled out before her, Guest pelgos and Founder pelgos alike. They were both beautiful in their own way; the rust red of the Guest pelgos slow but steady erosion catching in currents and swirling around the Founder resorts and walls. This view never ceased to remind her that, regardless of all Chen's populist prattle and the Council's impassive stubbornness, the Guests and the Founders were as close to one as two could be. The Founders needed the Guests' skills to build their vision, and the Guests needed the Founders' aid, be it medicine or food or, especially, water.

She sighed and tore her eyes from the view, and her mind from its reverie, so that she could return to her work. Damn Arkoral and its stubborn genetic code. She had tried to play with the keying of the clone samples she had been afforded by the ArkLaboratories complex, who held the only base sample of Arkoral, but all it had yielded were sticky messes of multicolored goo or big, light rock-like plates; the accursed stuff just wouldn't grow right when she altered the keying of the genes responsible for growth rate, seeing as the idiot savant who had sequenced the stuff in the first place had put the locus of the growth rate gene on the carbon-enzyme chromosome, and she couldn't change anything without completely voiding Arkoral's ability to utilize environmental carbon. She supposed her plates could be used as armor, but she wasn't here to find a revolutionary new bulletproof material.

She was here, Amelie reminded herself, to make Arkoral grow faster, stronger, and more rigid. Raging over the materials she had been given would not accelerate her research.

Amelie pulled out her notes and pored over them for another few minutes, attempting to catch out any clues that could help her that perhaps she had subconsciously missed. Nothing. She could swear she had tried every combination of genes in the whole of Arkoral's genetic code, but obviously she hadn't.

She had to keep trying. She know the true usefulness of the material (it _had _built the Ark, after all) but it had so much _potential! _It could be so much... _better_.

She booted her computer and started up a sequencer application, loading her files on Arkoral, and began to play with the genetic sequencing in an idle fit of boredom. Nothing worked. She had already tried dozens of the combinations she was setting up. Genotype ratios, DNA rewriting, there just didn't seem to be any way. She _knew_ there was; there was nothing in the world that was unimprovable.

Arkoral was probably as close as things came, though.

In frustration, she abandoned her post at her computer for the third time today. She swung out of her swivel chair, pushed open the door to her office, and headed for the elevator.


	3. Welcome to the Ark

-The Engineer-

"Sorry I dragged you into this, kid," former-Engineer Parson said, his unkempt, stringy mop of hair falling out from under his hat as he bowed his head in penance for some nonexistent crime. The room they were locked in was dark, small (he could tell by how it sounded when he spoke), and, he guessed, was unfurnished except for the two chairs they were tied to.

The police forces had been fast, that much was for certain; they had pulled up in front of Parson and the little girl's dinghy with their speedboat, stopping them. Then, a team of marines had debarked from the speedboat, tied the two up, blindfolded them, and thrown them unceremoniously onto the deck. As they motored away, a huge explosion followed on their heels. Parson assumed it was their boat.

Now, they were locked in a dark room with no way of escaping, waiting out their fates.

They didn't have to wait long.

The door slid open, and, even through the blindfold, it blinded Parson, who was on the chair facing the door. A silhouette blocked the light seeping through the blindfold as _somebody_ entered the room, and then the door slammed shut and the eyeache began to recede. The little girl whimpered in fear.

A sigh echoed out of the darkness, deep, infuriated, and tired. "How much do you know?" asked the sigher, clearly a woman by voice tone.

"About what?" Parson fired back, confusion sinking in.

"The Ark. Where we are, what we are, what we have. Give me some answers, Guest."

"Nothing. Skipper knew where we were going; he was the only one who knew how to read maps. And _everyone_ on what land is left knows what the Ark is.

"I'm assuming that's where we are, then. The Ark?"

"Yes," the woman said, sinking into a chair, or some chair-analog; she definitely threw herself back into something intended to support a human's weight. She sighed again. "There were more of you?"

"Yeah," Parson said. "We had about five punters and their fam-"

"Punters?"

"Yeah. Rich folks, wantin' a ticket to the Ark after you guys decided to stop giving 'em free flights out here. So yeah, five punters and their families. The girl's from one of them. Then there was me-"

"So you're not her parent or guardian, then?"

"No, but I may as well be," Parson said. "Now are you going to let me finish?"

"Certainly. Go ahead." Parson heard a swish on a clipboard; she had marked something. Probably a legal form of some sort.

"-and my crewmates, Skipper and Sarge."

"What happened to the rest of them, then?"

"They died. We either ate them or hurled them into the ocean."

"I see. So you were running an illegal business bringing immigrants to the Ark, and you made it. By _you_ I mean you and the girl. Congratulations to you both for surviving." An unmistakable tone of sarcasm laced her voice. In a past life, Parson might have sharpened his own tongue to do battle with her, but the boat- no, the Boat had changed him. He kept his mouth shut.

"I'm not legally allowed to force you to leave the Ark, but I can force you to leave this side of the Ark, and send you to the Guest Pelgos. Are you willing to assume responsibility for this girl?"

"What'll you do with her if I don't?"

"She'll be sent to the orphanage." Something about the way she said it made it a proper noun in Parson's mind. This wasn't just any orphanage. This was the capital O-rphanage.

"What exactly is that?"

"Well, a lot of the Guests don't have the resources to raise children, and so they give them up. The Founders adopt them, sometimes. Other times, they don't. The kids are pressed into Ark Security if they're not adopted by eighteen."

There was a pregnant silence; Parson was thinking.

"I refuse responsibility for the girl," he finally stated, after a brief sigh.

"Are you certain?"

"I am," Parson said.

"Very well. We'll take her to the Orphanage now."

The lights came on, blinding Parson, and two other Ark Security gendarmes swept into the room, submachine guns raised, as the interrogator-woman stood and untied the girl.

Parson raised his chin, cleared his throat, and spoke. "Good luck, kid. I got you this far. Now, it's up to you to get farther."

She turned around. Through the gauze, Parson could see her blurry outline, and that of the interrogator. The girl's hand was locked tightly into the interrogator's hand.

"Bye," she said, her voice breaking. Parson's heart leapt into his throat, and he stifled tears as she left.

The gendarmes lowered their guns, and the lights turned off, and the door sealed.

It was dark again, and he was alone.

-The Daughter-

There was nothing she could do; the guards following her and the woman who had taken her from the room were armed to the teeth; they had stun batons, grenades, and submachine guns of the same model as the Engineer's.

"So, sweetie, what's your name?" asked the woman officer, Her voice changing from iron to honey in the space of time it had taken to leave the room.

"Gretchen," she said.

"Gretchen. Well, Gretchen, here's what we're going to do; we're taking you to the Ark's Orphanage. There, you'll be fed and clothed as well as we can spare. Hopefully, a Founder will take you in. If not, though, then you'll be drafted into Ark Security when you leave the Orphanage. How does that sound?"

"Fine. I guess." Gretchen was lying; nothing could be worse! She needed _freedom_, needed someplace to collect her thoughts. Landing on the Ark was only one step in her plan; now she needed to figure out phase two.

"Good. It'll be fun! You'll meet lots of kids, and get to play games and things. Now follow me," said the officer, as she led Gretchen down the hall off of which the one with Engineer's cell branched. This one was considerably bigger, and had rooms interspersed every few meters. Gretchen presumed they were offices, or maybe other cells. Then, they reached the end of the hall, and walked into an atrium. It was full of plants and trees, and gleaming white walkways made of... what had he called it... Arkoral! That was it. The Arkoral walkways cut through the cultivated canopy and led through the atrium into different adjoining buildings.

The officer led Gretchen to the center of the Atrium, which was a huge plaza with a modern art sculpture in the center, and an automated information kiosk near the sculpture. A tall black man was standing by the map, wearing Security blues.

"Okay, Gretchen, here's where I leave you. This is Officer Baptiste," She said, waving at the man, "and he'll take you to the Orphanage."

She then turned to the man and murmured something in his ear. He nodded quickly and snapped a salute as She stepped back. She returned the salute crisply, and then turned about on Her heel and walked away. Officer Baptiste relaxed a bit as She left, and finally, knelt all the way down, so his eyes were level with Gretchen's, when he was certain She was gone. He gazed into Gretchen's eyes for a short time, then glanced over his shoulder and flashed her a conspiratorial wink.

"I don't like Her either," he said. His English was flavored by a French accent and had the sort of clipped precision of one who had learned it at a very high level as a second language; his pronunciation was exact to the point of artificiality, his grammar perfect in a surgical way. "She always makes me work late, and never, _ever_ buys me nice things for it."

Gretchen giggled. Something about the way he had seemed ashamed of saying that last sentence had brought her into the conspiracy against The Woman in Whites.

"So, She told me to take you to the Orphanage. What She _didn't_ tell me was to do it _quickly_." He flashed a smile; his teeth were perfectly aligned and evenly white. He was a poster boy for the police. "How do you like ice cream?"

"Oh, you shouldn't."

"No, I should. No reason that your first memory of Ark should be bad. Come on."

There was only one ice-cream parlor on the Ark, for two very good reasons; one, milk was expensive, and being the nutritious fluid it was, rationing was necessary. Two, it was good enough to put the biggest and best out of business. Before the seas rose, in a bizarre fit of childish enthusiasm completely out of keeping with their normal serious idealism, the Founders had searched the Earth for the best living ice-cream makers, and put their best flavors to the test scientifically and subjectively. In the end, the Founders had selected a young man from Hokkaido, eighth in a line of masters, who had, according to his family tradition, mastered the art using snow before he had moved on to milk bases. They had put him to work making ice cream for Founders and their Children, and whichever millionaires or scientists wanted to send pictures of their confections back home to friends or family.

It was _amazing_, Gretchen decided, as she took the first lick of her cone. There had been a family-owned parlor in her neighborhood before it had closed due to the skyrocketing costs of milk (in excess of ten dollars to a gallon; it had been twice as expensive as gasoline), and the taste was almost the same, but better. The flavor she had ordered, mint chocolate chip, was nearly white in color, as opposed to the nuclear green of her childhood, and the dark chocolate chips were so cold that they exploded when they touched her tongue, vaporizing into a cloud of chocolate flavor on which she had nearly choked when she tried to swallow. The mint flavor was bittersweet; the raging sugar was still there, but the man had obviously used the real, actual _plant!_ How he had gotten it when over half the world was sunk beneath the ocean, Gretchen had no idea.

Baptiste had gotten a double scoop orange sherbet/piña colada, and was enjoying it immensely. Somehow, he managed not to spill any; his poster-boy looks apparently translated to manners and food skills as well.

Once they finished their ice-creams, Baptiste broke out the bottle of water that he had purchased to wash it all down, and took a sip, his lips not even brushing the mouth of the bottle, before insisting that Gretchen have the rest. She accepted it, and he took her hand and walked her to the Orphanage.

It was the first time she had been happy since stepping onto the Ark Security speedboat.

It wasn't going to last forever.

-The Radical-

It was another Ark morning for Joe Chen.

After listening to his bones ache and creak for about fifteen minutes, he looked up at his ceiling and sighed. Another day with an empty space in his heart, an empty space in his bed, another day with a pointless second 'happiness' in the glyph above his head. The happiness calligraphic symbol in general was pointless. It had been for years.

_Oh, Qian,_ he bemoaned. _Why?_

He put all thoughts of his wife aside. If he let regrets about the past take hold of him, he would never make it out of bed in the morning.

_Like I never had when she_-

_Damn it!_ He pushed himself to his feet, ignoring his knees' protest and the persistent backache he was developing. The people needed to see him on his feet, they needed to see him doing his share, they needed to see their _leader_. _They,_ Chen reminded himself, _are who I am doing this for_. _Not me, not my ego, not Ark._

_The people._

He picked up his glasses and focused a beam of sunlight through them onto a plump, thick cigar to light it, then shoved it between his teeth, puffed on it a bit, and then picked up his baseball bat. The bat was his last memento of old San Francisco, before he had left the land and gone, forever, to Ark.

_A great city. Oh, Qian. If you could see me now, see what you had in store..._

Chen stood up and grimaced, then began the long walk to his speaking place, to give the Guests their morning inspirational speech. A large crowd was already assembled, and he was ready. He had prepared it last night, and thought it was particularly good. A ragged cheer went up in the crowd as he ascended to the stage, made of crates and corrugated iron bolted together.

"Are any of you Christian? I promise I won't get too religious on you, of course. Not that I am, in particular." Something about him _meaning_ it to be funny _made_ it funny, and he pulled a laugh from the crowd.

"I'm going to read you a verse from Genesis, the first book of the Bible. I just found it on an old e-reader, and though it was mighty appropriate." A few moans from the crowds, a couple of chuckles. Religion wasn't exactly a tough topic with most Guests; most of them were too tired to care, anyway, and all of them knew that you couldn't get around without stepping on a few toes here and there.

"Genesis 1: 9-10" said Chen, and the audience was captured, listening intently as he spoke. "'And God said, "Let the waters under the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.'

"I found that a bit pertinent to humanity's situation today. Many sermonizers among you have done their best to convince you that either God is a liar, cheating on his promise to never again flood Earth, or that He is once again vengeful, flooding the Earth to cleanse wickedness.

"I survey the people in front of me, and see this 'wickedness'. None of you have clean hands. All of you have had to destroy, kill, or ruin to get to Ark, to stay alive. And you should be proud. Not because you had to kill and maim, and doom others to drown, but because you did what you had to do, and you're here today because of that.

"Now, we're doing what we have to do again; we're doing our best to fix this, our problem," Chen said, gesturing to the seas behind him. "Because this is not God's problem. He, whether or not He exists, has not visited this on us. We have visited this upon ourselves. This is a problem of Man, and Man is solving it. _You_ are solving it. Every day."

Chen stepped down, and waited for the throng to pass, and various other speakers, Guests and Founders, to get up and say their piece, keeping the Ark's citizens up to date with new developments and events, and rousing some of the more fringe elements to fervor. After a while, Chen joined the throng shuffling towards the boats to their daily work. It was time to put bread on the table.

Even the AWU Party's General Secretary had to have a day job.

-The Guest-

"Get your leg up!" Fred shouted. "If you're going to be fighting somebody, they'll just grab your ankle and yank you back down!" For emphasis, he wrapped his hand around the shin of the man hauling himself up over the container and yanked downward, ripping the climber's hands from the ledge and hurling him back down to the gymnastics mats below.

Another man leapt heroically at the crate, getting his elbows over the edge, and hoisted his chest up and over, keeping his legs tucked up against his body. He stood, about-faced, and leapt another gap, landing flawlessly on the shipping container across the gap from him. Fred looked up and acknowledged him with a golf-clap before turning his attentions to another man attempting to climb the first crate.

Once everybody had made it to the top of the second container, Fred pushed the stuff around a bit and rolled out a series of extra crates, containers, and ladders. He took some time setting them up into a series of alleys in the large gymnasium. Then, he wheeled out the pingball gear.

"Alright, gents," he shouted down one alley. "Find a place to hide. On my whistle, you're going to play some Pingball. Use your parkour skills to get into more advantageous positions. If somebody taps you on the shoulder, you're out. If you're shot three times before you can heal up, you're out. I'll know," Fred said, waving a tablet computer up in the air, which had a Pingball hosting application on it. "Now go kill each other," he commanded. As he walked away, he blew the whistle.

Pingball had evolved from a combination of paintball and first-person shooters, becoming the go-to military tactical training system during the early 2020s, before the Flood. Each player had a 'gun', a sophisticated series of lasers that simulated bullet declination profiles for various weapons and calibers, and a 'suit', which simulated the loss of body parts due to being shot. One could clear the suit's fake injuries by finding medical kits for the various injuries. In addition, they could play with weak spots enabled, making shooting somebody, say, in the head, a faster kill than shooting them in the arm. Melee attacks were also programmable, so that punching somebody could disorient them or injure their suit.

Fred watched the Pingball host system. He had this playing field mapped out on the Pingball map system, so he could see what they were doing by rotating a three-dimensional map of the alleys. Each suit had a transponder in it that transmitted injuries back and forth between the host and the player, so Fred could remote-'kill' a player if he was displeased with his conduct, and so he could always know how a fight was going.

There was at least one fight going sour right now. Cadet Hale was getting nailed by Officer Morrigan at the moment. He had two shots listed on his transponder, but it wasn't over 'til the fat lady sang, and Hale knew it. He was trying to lure Morrigan into a trap he had set up.

Pingball included grenades and such, small RFID spheres with an activation pin, which had transponders as well, so that Fred could see how far they had cooked off. Hale had one cooked all the way, and wrapped in a filament strung across the aperture through which he had darted to escape Morrigan's fire. If Morrigan stepped through the hole in the crates, he would trigger the grenade and be killed instantly.

He stepped through.

The 'grenade' went off, and his suit instantly froze. He dropped to the ground, helpless, and began cursing up a storm. Hale rushed out of cover and grabbed Morrigan's rifle and grenades, then darted out into the street.

"Good work, Hale," Fred announced over the PA. "Officer Morrigan is out."

Hale made a dash across the street and swung up into a sniping position, one foot bracing himself against a steel strut welded between two containers and his back flat up against a plywood board. He managed to 'kill' two other gendarmes before they finally brought him down. That brought Fred's class down to four, all stealthily roaming the improvised container city, seeking to kill one another so that they might eventually turn out as the victor.

In the end, it was Sergeant Halifax, as it so often was; his instinctive understanding of the mechanics of parkour allowed him to strip a move bare and utilize its aspects in alternate maneuvers. That, and he was a damned good shot with a Gerund assault rifle. He put a 'bullet' through the head of the second-to-last player with ease, and his silencer muffled the simulated muzzle flash and resounding _brat-t-t-t-t_ of his weapon, meaning the poor bastard never even knew where he got nailed from.

The final kill signaled match's end, and so the suits were unfrozen, allowing the 'dead' to get up and leave. Fred hoisted himself up and over a container and slid to the door, preparing his performance reviews.

"Halifax, top marks. Excellent utilization of the silencer for stealth.

"Hale, good on you for that trap. Clever, clever.

"Morrigan, remember; never enter an unsecured building without backup."

"Yessir," Morrigan responded, his burly face flushed with shame.

"Stefan, Arkadyovich, Halifax got you both with that grenade. Try to work on staying a safe distance apart when you're working as a team.

"Jacobs, use your damn iron sights; this is not a shoot 'em up game, this is real life. Or, it will be soon." Jacobs rolled his eyes. He was the youngest in the class, conscripted straight out of the Orphanage, and had yet to learn any respect for authority.

"MacAllister, you need to work on your grenade throwing skills. The same goes for you, Gupta. Class dismissed."

Fred's Practical Movement disappeared into the morning sun, and Fred leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, as he lit up a cig and stared after them.

-The Scientist-

Amelie was picking at her lunch, a salad that had a strong chemical taste and a few morsels of chicken, as she poked at a laptop, scanning ArkLabs's intranet for any information about Arkoral's genetics and how one might incite the damn stuff to grow faster, when she found _it_.

_It_ in question was an essay on Arkoral growth rates when certain genes were resequenced to include alternative carbonic bases. It certainly looked promising; at least, more promising than a lot of the pseudoscientific drivel she had been able to come up with in the past month. She made a mental note to review it later as she picked up her laptop and tossed her salad in the recycler, shuddering at the memory of it. The thing had tasted like formaldehyde.

The immense holographic clock projected by a series of yellow lasers into the middle of the ArkLabs complex's atrium read 1:23 PM, and she hadn't even gotten a thing done yet. But then, sometimes it seemed like they were paying her for doing nothing; she had simply been eating, sleeping, tearing her hair out over Arkoral, and then calming down so she could resume work for the past _month_.

Hopefully, the document might help things out.

She stepped out of the lobby and walked down through the hedgerows toward the ArkSec checkpoint. As she passed her scientist coworkers, she felt a pang of envy; they all had the _easy_ jobs. She was off trying to genetically engineer Arkoral, and they were working on improving crop yields and fish body mass, or new alternate-energy power plants or things like that. She missed working on the simple things, but she had signed on for this, and _damn_ if she wasn't going to make it work.

She reached the checkpoint and set her bag on the table, then shucked her labcoat, pulling the I.D. pass from the clear lapel pocket before putting the coat in an X-ray machine's plastic tray, followed by the bag.

"Checking out early again, Miss Parker?" asked the gendarme heading the checkpoint, a man named Marcus.

"Yeah," she replied. He shoved the tray into the machine's scanning deck before declaring her possessions clean, and it popped out the other side, allowing her to retrieve the coat and bag. She did so, and continued on her way, out into the bright sunlight and immaculate white walls of the Upper Ark. There was a commuter boat a short distance down the ArkLabs concourse, which only housed the few scientists in permanent residence and whatever shops and storehouses might be necessary to keeping a laboratory up and running.

She walked down the smooth, immaculate Arkoral road, the rubberized plastic of her shoes' soles creating little scuff marks on the pure white surface. They would be gone by tomorrow morning, thanks to the Guests who labored day and night to keep the Ark spotless and the commuter transportation schedule tight and on-time. And countless other tasks, as well. _Damn, _she thought, scolding herself sarcastically. _Somebody's feeling solidarity with the Guests today_.

When she reached the docks, the boat was just pulling into port; she smiled and quickened her pace. She would go home, read the document, and then come back tomorrow with a fresh perspective on the whole thing.

Life was good sometimes.


	4. Acidification

Chapter 3: Acidification

-The Engineer

Life sucked sometimes.

It had been at least a month since his last physical contact with a photon. Or maybe a week. Or a day. Or an hour. Parson couldn't be sure.

He sighed to his empty cell and started wandering the room, his arms raised in case he bumped into an unseen object. Not that he would, though. When they had taken the girl, they had released him from his bonds and chair.

They hadn't fed him, though. He knew that much. His stomach had been telling him that with every step he took, every minute he lived. _If I had known this would be the Ark, I would have stayed home._

He finally acquiesced to the darkness, returning to his chair and running his fingers through his malnourished hair.

Of course, that was when they opened the door.

The light blinded him, and for a minute after they (whoever _they_ were) closed the door, every time he blinked, he saw two silhouettes against the shifting background of multicolored pain.

They had set a tray down in front of the door, Parson discovered when he knelt down in front of the damned portal and burned his hand in the soup bowl.

…_soup?_

Parson immediately felt around for a crust of bread. Grabbing one from the tray, he dipped it in the soup and blew frantically, trying to cool it before he lost his self-control and just drank the whole bowl. He was probably spilling soup of whatever kind it was all over himself, but it was _food_, real food, for the first time in weeks. He frantically tore a chunk of sopping bread off the boule, and burnt his mouth in the process. First came the scouring pain, then the metallic taste of the burn. The pain was chased by the by the soup, a miso-like concoction, and finally, the mellow, chewy sourness of the bread.

_Hmm. Good, for prison food._

More calmly, he finished the bread (there wasn't much in the first place) and sipped at his bowl of soup, careful not to burn his mouth further. There was a sweetly salty flavor to it under the seaweed and mouth burns he had inflicted upon himself, which indicated that it was made with a seawater base. _There's enough of the stuff around here_, Parson thought, and chuckled at his own joke.

It could be _worse_.

-The Radical-

Chen was tired.

The whole damn ArkConstruction team was tired. They had been working, no, _laboring_, for five hours straight to repair this immense God-damned _hole_ in the main launch deck on Pelgo 2. It hadn't been there _before_, but it was _now_, and the Founders wanted it fixed. _So their trigger-happy Security gorillas can buzz our homes with their flying machines and ruin our lives with their authority. Like teenagers given badges._ Chen scoffed and then immediately regretted it.

Arkoral smelled awful when it was setting. It smelled like dung. No, worse than that; it smelled as though a thousand seagulls had jettisoned their feces onto a target made of pickled durian. Chen smirked and resumed holding his breath.

One of the reasons the ArkConstruction team was taking so long was because of the fumes given off by the setting of the material; Arkoral liberated carbon from atmospheric CO2 and released oxygen as a byproduct, but when it stripped carbon from carbonic acid in the water, it released trioxidane, which humans cannot breathe; and, as mentioned before, the stuff stank to high heaven. And, of course, Ark being Ark, there were no breath masks available at the moment, thank you for asking. Thus, they had to rotate workers often so that they weren't incapacitated by the fumes.

And of course, they were rebuilding an Arkoral foundation that had eroded _in the water_. So, carbonic acid aplenty. Why the hell the geneers couldn't have done their work completely and engineered the stuff to break the bond between the water and CO2 molecule was beyond Chen. Probably had to do with water slowing foundation setting, or cell energy expenditure. Chen made a mental note to ask an ArkLabs scientist at first chance.

Then, one of the men spilled Arkoral seed on himself.

_Ah, shit,_ Chen thought. _There goes an easy day_.

The man froze instantly as the shiny, chalky substance dripped off his forearm and his teammates were on him in seconds; they had to get the stuff off before it started to set or it could actually start stripping carbon from his body and using it. _The one thing they get right..._

Arkoral had exactly one genetic prototype. It was extremely closely guarded at the ArkLabs facility and was kept in specially formulated purified water to keep it from mutating (Arkoral was prone to mutations due to its delicate and highly reactive carbon-based DNA), but that wasn't enough. Somewhere along the line, back when the Ark was still in the prototype phase, Arkoral's mutations had caused it to develop an enzyme that was able to use the massive amount of carbon present in organic compounds; it started with fish. Ecosystem tests showed sudden drops in fish nesting over Arkoral ground, because replicating Arkoral ate them and their eggs alive. The first _human_ fatality was when a cameraman for a San Franciscan news company accidentally swam into a patch of replicating active-seed Arkoral in only a pair of swim trunks. By the time they got it off his back it had appropriated his spinal cord and major nervous structure. They euthanized him on the spot by drowning. The Ark program had been delayed by years because of the publicity involved, so they resequenced it to make it set faster to reduce risk of such a thing happening again. Except, of course, in construction. It was too difficult and dangerous to induce a mutation again; God only knew what they might lose from their only mature sample.

There were procedures involved in cleaning active-seed Arkoral off of a victim; one was to spray the stuff with a sterilizing agent. They had, of course, forgotten the agent, thinking that it was such a routine day that the team wouldn't need it.

_Goddamned enzymatic mutations and Goddamned Arkoral and Goddamned nerds in ArkLabs-_

"Help, guys!" the stricken statue moaned as his teammates frantically tried to scrape it off his arm and onto... anything else. Chen frantically looked around for something to scrape it off with.

_There!_ He jumped over to a biohazard safety suit (it was going to save the man's life, whether he wore it or not) and picked up the head in both gigantic hands. One, he used to hold the edges of the plexiglas safety plate, and the other, he pulled back about three inches to deliver a punch to the glass.

_Let's hope I still remember how to do this_, he thought, and he sharply swung his three lower knuckles into the plastic. His loose grip on the border allowed him to free the faceplate, and he rushed over to the human statue, preparing to scrape.

The Arkoral was starting to draw blood.

If it seeded into his bloodstream he was going to die a painful death; his blood would back up in his veins, and eventually, he would go through full body necrosis as nutrient-rich blood failed to pass his heart. Or, if sufficiently far from an artery, his skin would burst and he would bleed to death.

Chen started scraping.

He didn't know when he stopped, or when the amboat came to take him to Ark's hospital, but it came, and they took the afflicted out of Chen's care.

_He's going to die._

_He's going to die because Arkoral's creators were so blind._

_They were_ blind.

-The Scientist-

When the boat pulled in and offloaded the patient, Amelie knew something was wrong. They hid him from view with a nylon full body shroud, something normally reserved for burn victims or hideously wounded Security officers, and nobody in a civil amboat would be either of those things. Another thing was that they moved far too fast and efficiently. The clincher, the one that told her what it was that had happened, was the way that none of them even touched the shroud; they treated it all like it was a biohazard.

_It's an Arkoral wound_, Amelie realized, and her eyes widened as she started after them, but she stopped herself short. If they could heal him, it would be miraculous; a wound big enough to warrant a body shroud would be, by now, unfixable, and they wouldn't be able to accept consent for amputation on grounds of the victim being in a pain-induced delusion.

God damn it. She had said, several times, that they needed to fix Arkoral; it was fine if it wanted to eat tilapia alive, but it was eating humans now too; the level of deadly accidents with Arkoral were already on a scale, relatively speaking, with a century's worth of steel construction accidents in the U.S. And that was just within the twenty years that the Ark had been afloat. What was worse, construction was the only job most Guests could learn or take on the Ark, and getting an injury meant you and yours were forfeit to whoever could take them or whoever took it upon themselves to protect your family. Assuming anyone cared enough anyways.

There would be people hearing about this.

There would be publicity.

They- no, the _Ark_- could not afford that. Not with the tensions between the AWU and Founders' Council at such heights. It would tear the Ark apart.

She willed herself to remember this moment; if ever she needed motivation to get back to work, this was as good as any. She needed to fix it. Before it got out of hand.

-The Guest-

Fred leaned against the sign that said not to do exactly that because 'THE RAILING IS UNSTABLE!' with a cool nonchalance as the dwindling sunlight beat down on his boonie hat's wide khaki brim. The waves lapping against the side of the ancient, beached ferry had a calming effect on him, as did watching the Sun slowly set behind the container stacks. Soon he would be going back to his container, and getting some sleep. He had more teaching to do.

"Can I just say that I'm ruining a very contemplative-looking scene right now?" Isadora asked as she stepped out from the elevated car-park on one side of the ferry. "Like, seriously movie-worthy philosophical scene. Use the Force, Fred!"

Fred laughed and turned around to face her. Isadora's face was smeared with the Ark's artificial soil and her clothes were as black as night from the stuff. "Hard day?" he asked.

"Yep. We planted a few meters of wheat and harvested a good amount of hydroponically grown fruits and herbs. Our water desalinization plant broke down halfway through the day, and so we had to shut it down and fix it before-"

"Again? Seriously? That's the fourth time this week!"

"Yeah. I think it's gonna break for good soon. Ark has been lending us water for farming, but who can tell how long that'll last? Ark's population just keeps getting higher, and that means more thirsty mouths."

"Yeah. If only there were some way to just... I don't know... fix it."

"Whaddaya mean?" Isadora asked.

"I know I sound like I'm complaining, but when I was on my way here, Ark seemed like the only future. I got here and suddenly I'm thrown into this... I dunno, this grind, where every day you have to work sixteen hours to get fed and clothed long enough to make it through another day so you can go work sixteen more hours, and the cycle repeats. You come in and you're an idealist, and then you get beaten down."

"Job got you down?"

"No, it's more than that. We do what's asked of us. We do our daily grind, but it's not enough. We don't have any time to fix things when they break down, or get ahead in the world, or even just enjoy ourselves. Like you with your farm equipment."

Isadora stared at Fred a moment before speaking. "What is it you said you did before you came here?"

Fred puffed out a deep breath, as if preparing himself to out a secret. "I was a molecular biologist, working for a big agricultural company on geneering plants. I was smart. I graduated high school and had a zillion academic scholarships. I went around the country, riding on these offers. I was staying in Seattle over summer break while I earned another Master's at the University of Hawai'i when the seas rose, and I panicked, and ran here.

"Maybe you're the one who can fix it."

"Pardon me?"

"We need a solution. What's the biggest issue on the Ark right now?"

"Water, of course."

"Yeah, and why? Cause the supply is too small and the demand is too great. So how do you fix that?"

"Reduce demand or increase supply."

"Exactly!" Isadora exclaimed, "and what eats up the most water on the Ark?"

Realization dawned on Fred as Isadora cocked her head, waiting for him to get it. "You want me to geneer a plant that uses less water."

"It's up to you."

"You and I both know that if the Founders found out, they'd seize the first generation and all my notes for the ArkLabs archives."

"So hide them. You're smart; you said it yourself."

"I never agreed to this!" he shouted at Isadora's back as she walked away.

"Your eyes did," she said, and sauntered on back to her home.

-The Daughter-

"Follow close, Gretchen," said Baptiste, as they walked into the Orphanage's front room.

"Okay," she squeaked. The entirely white room was a bit intimidating, considering it was a building for children.

"Good morning," Baptiste said to the receptionist. "I have a child going up for adoption."

"Another one?" The receptionist sighed.

"Yes. You know that there're always more."

The receptionist sighed again and began scribbling at a form, then printed something and handed it to Baptiste. He filled it out and handed it back, and a few minutes later, Baptiste slid a bracelet down onto Gretchen's wrist.

"This is your arphid bracelet. That's arr-eff-eye-dee," he instructed her, as he secured it. "It'll allow you to gain access to certain rooms in the Orphanage, like the kitchen and your bedroom.

"It won't come off unless the lock is released by the resonator on the reception desk. There's almost no way to destroy the plastic band, and they automatically become rigid when they're pressed against skin."

"So it's not coming off."

"Smart girl. Don't get into any trouble while I'm gone, okay?"

"O… okay."

Baptiste smiled, patted her shoulder, and about-faced, walking out of the door.

"You're going to have _sooo_ much fun here," the receptionist drawled. She didn't even look up from her computer to acknowledge Gretchen's presence.

"There's only one way to go from here, kid. That arphid only opens one door in this room." Gretchen could hear some flurries of typing coming from the woman's vicinity.

"It leads to the playroom, in case you were wondering. God, kid, do you _ever_ talk?"

"No," Gretchen muttered, and headed toward the playroom door.


	5. Midnight Oil

-The Guest-

Damn, but it was late.

Fred had been going at his old project for a few hours now, ever since he got home from his class. It was… what? 12:13 AM, his old, battered laptop said, but he didn't care.

He had been close on land, when it was just a project for a friend that he had been working on in his spare time. Now, on the Ark, he was even closer. _Never could say no to a favor_, he mused as he operated the sequencing program.

The plant he was working on was called risea. It had been commissioned by a friend of Fred's named Ryan, who had moved to Israel after graduating from the University of Washington with a Master's in some field of agricultural studies. He had wanted a plant that could produce food for the masses and laid little demand on potable water supply. Fred had said 'sure thing.'

Then the seas rose, and Israel went under. Fred never heard from Ryan again.

…_okay_.

_Okay. It's done._ Fred rose from his chair, saved the files, and ejected the disk from the laptop, then slid it back into its protective container and pocketed it.

_Time for a quick walk_.

He released the locks at the end of his container and shouldered the door open. A gust of warm night air curled its tendrils into the confined space as Fred pulled on his jacket and slipped away, locking the container behind him.

It was dark but for the stars, and a few lamps in the containers here and there. It would have been crisp out if it weren't for the wet heat that pervaded Ark, but Fred didn't have time to enjoy it. He had to get the files to Isadora.

"Oi. You there, Guest. What're you doin' out so late?" a voice called down an alley as Fred passed it. Fred froze as a Security officer aimed a flashlight mounted on his Kross submachine gun into Fred's eyes, blinding him.

"Easy, easy. Just taking a walk," Fred said, raising his hands into the air.

"Bit late for 'at, inn'it?"

"A bit."

The guard walked forward, his footsteps accompanied by a soft _clink_, barely muffled by the iron sand dusted over the pelgo's surface.

"Alright," he said. He had a thin, slightly lilting Irish brogue that added a dimension of friendliness to his voice, as if he were somebody you'd meet in a bar and drive you home if you got drunk. "Where you goin', then?"

"Out to the farm and back."

The guard paused. "Be on your way, then."

Fred turned and walked away from the man, blowing out a breath he hadn't even known he was holding. Once he was sure the guard was out of earshot, he leapt onto a container and ran down to the deck of the carrier as fast as he possibly could.

The amber glow of the lights around the perimeter of the carrier's launch deck glowed softly, casting the farm rows in soft relief as Fred leapt up the stairs and onto the deck.

"Hey!" a man shouted, and a laser point burst into being on Fred's chest. Distantly, from above (Fred guessed it was from the top of the carrier's conning tower) he heard a bolt being pulled, and the soft rustle of a weapon being raised against the fabric of a uniform.

"Sentry! It's Fred!" he shouted against the night. "Don't shoot!"

"Oh. Sorry!" The laser winked out of existence and Fred heard the click of the gun's safety as the sentry lowered it. He forced his heart to slow down and entered the tower.

He left the disc on Isadora's desk, in her office on the second floor, and scribbled a note on it.

"_You owe me one._

_-Love, Fred."_

-The Engineer-

Parson would have slept longer if the door hadn't been slammed open by the officer posted at his cell as he slid the food into the dark room.

_Shit! _Parson stifled a shout at the immense noise.

_Wha- what time is it? Is it morning?_

He groped around in the darkness before his door, searching for the tray. He eventually found it when he brushed his fingertips over a piece of toast, and he picked up the cooked bread, slowly chewing his way through it as he contemplated escape.

_Easiest way would be to get a gun..._

He lifted the bowl of cereal off of the tray and slid the tray under his blanket.

_May as well_. Parson heaved to his feet and began to do some push-ups. If he were in this lockup for too long, his muscles would start to atrophy, and he'd be too weak for any escape.

_Down. Down. Down. Down. _He kept going, pressing his nose to the floor and lifting his body back up thirteen times before his back gave out and he fell to the floor. _I guess I'm more malnourished than I thought._

He crawled back into bed, defeated, and relaxed onto the hard cot.

The door opened again, and another tray of food slid in.

Parson furrowed his brow in the dark room as he stared at the rectangle of white in his vision where the door had been. _...the hell? They just put food in here!_

Or did they?

Or maybe this was their plan?

Parson felt a headache building, prickling the backs of his eyes as he struggled to make sense of this perceived dilation in time. It was going to be a long sentence. And he didn't even know how long.

The food was left to get cold as Parson lapsed back into sleep, hoping to alleviate his confusion.

-The Radical-

Chen couldn't sleep.

The hospital had offered him a room, and he had gratefully accepted. He had wanted to escape the damned double happiness that followed his dreams everywhere. It hadn't worked.

He should have gone home. Now, he was just wracked with worries for the man whose life was at risk because of the Arkoral spill. He had no idea who the doctors treating him were, or whether they would respect him as much as a Founder in the same predicament. _As if they'd ever see a Founder with Arkoral scars. _Chen _harrumphed _in his mind as he folded his arms and stared out at Founders' Tower.

He could hear some of the on-site doctors returning to their apartments passing outside his door, and he scowled. _None of them have scars either_.

_...no. I will not judge. We are in the same boat, they and I, and God forbid I should sink it._

He shifted slightly on the bed and gritted his teeth at the stunning spire just outside his window.

Founders' Tower was beautiful in the starlight, the Arkoral's high albedo and light-scattering properties causing it to glow softly, brighter where starlight met the white surface head-on and darker where sections were still unfinished.

_Ha. Half the whole damn Ark is _unfinished_. How long have they been working on Founders' Tower now? Twenty years? They've had a doubled workforce thanks to us Guests and they don't even have to pay us, and they're still not done! Taller buildings have taken less_-

His tirade was interrupted by a knock on the door, and the subsequent entry of a doctor.

"Yes?" Chen queried, his voice resigned. He knew the man would be dead; the Arkoral would have eaten its way to the bone now-

"He's stable. You can come and see him now, if you want."

There was a long and awkward pause as Chen's mind sorted out known facts and the impossible. _He's... still alive? But... how? Arkoral spills are... _universally _fatal! Once it sets-_

_Wait._

_What if it didn't?_

"I think I will. Can you lead me to his room?"

"Certainly, Mister Chen. Right this way."

Chen got up and followed the doctor down the empty white halls, their footsteps echoing as they advanced through the hospital.

They reached the victim's room, and the doctor defered to Chen, who pushed open the door and entered.

He was... fine.

"Hey, brother," the victim said. Chen was dumbfounded.

"How did they... heal you?"

"They sterilized the Arkoral and pulled it off, then grafted some new skin over the wound. Good as new, except for the blood it ate. They said I bled enough to warrant a stay here for a while, though, so I guess I get some free food. Not a bad deal for a life threatening experience."

"I hope you get better soon," Chen said, numbly. His mind was elsewhere, trying to work out the details, the _how is this man still alive _element of the incident.

"Well, I don't. I don't have to work but I'm getting food for free. Like I said, not a bad deal." The bedridden Guest smirked and put his free arm behind his head; the other one was fixed in place while the skin graft took.

Chen left the room, his face a mask of confusion, and headed for the ferry terminal as the sun rose over the horizon, casting pastels across the horizon; pinks and oranges and every shade in between.

He could figure this out at home. After taking a bit of time to appreciate what he had left.

**A/N: This is a sort of filler chapter; not **_**all**_** the characters went to bed that night, and I needed a place to stick the development of risea. It's gonna be important later, just you watch. I guess I'm trying to apologize for breaking with the large-chapter trend set by Chapters 1 and 2, so sorry about that.**

**So there's this little blue line of text there... it sez 'review this chapter'. Click it and tell me what you thought, what you think, what incorrect usages of the English language you caught, etcetera etcetera.**


	6. Something for Nothing

-The Daughter-

"Unh!" Gretchen gasped as the boy hurled her into the wall. She desperately searched around for something to defend herself with before he was on her again.

His fist smashed into her unprotected abdomen and she snapped back against the wall, blood flying from her lips.

"Welcome to the Orphanage, bitch!" he laughed, punching her again. He laughed as she staggered to her feet and raised her fists in a defensive stance.

How the hell had this happened? She was minding her own business, wandering about the large empty space in the center of the Orphanage, when _this_ asshole had come along and tackled her from behind!

She roared at him as he stepped close for another punch. The thin mist of congealing blood flying from her lips blinded him as she swung her fist for his nose.

There was a sickening _crack_ and a spray of blood against the immaculate white floor, and Gretchen heard a collective gasp from the crowd of adolescents that had gathered to watch the fight.

There was a river of blood running down the boy's face, originating from his nose, and he clutched at it to staunch the flow while he raised his fist to punch Gretchen.

He swung.

She ducked.

"Ooof!" she exhaled, as another boy (one of Asshole's friends) punched her in the stomach. Again. That was gonna be bruised in the morning.

She landed on the floor and kicked at Asshole as he came over to curb-stomp her. Her kick connected and sent him reeling, doubled over and clutching at his belly. Gretchen planted a knee and levered herself up as he recovered.

"You done, asshole?" she shouted at him as he gasped for air.

"Fuck you," he grunted, standing up and running at her, bent down to tackle her.

It was a fairly simple matter to sidestep the idiot as he came at her. One foot moved about ninety degrees to line up with the other and she stepped back, sticking one foot out as she did.

When his toe slipped under the arch of her foot, he found his center of gravity shifting uncontrollably forward. His arm-flailing as he fell did nothing but cause him to hit his friends. Repeatedly.

Gretchen grinned at the fallen Asshole as he rolled over, locking burning eyes with her righteous ones. _Hey, you attacked me. What happened next was your problem_. She silently thanked the memory of her parents for hiring a self-defense tutor for her.

Of course, she didn't know how much longer she would have had to take classes on self-defense to put up a fight against a wall of eight angry teenage boys.

"Come _ON!_" she shouted to nobody in particular as they moved to surround her.

One of their faces started bleeding when she bopped him in the nose and started running away, into a hall on the other side of the room.

"BITCH!" one shouted as the gang followed her. "Come back here and we'll be gentle!"

"Screw you, pal!" came the return from the younger girl as she ran up the stairs at the end of the hall and turned around, leaping for a balcony railing.

She latched on with both hands and yanked herself up and over, then hid, forcing her breathing to slow down and her heart to stop, in case they could hear it.

If this was the archetypical day in the Orphanage, it was gonna be a long stay. No, not stay; _internment_.

Once they lost interest and returned to help their leader, whom Gretchen had left bleeding on a floor, she stood and began to silently walk away.

Until somebody tapped her on the shoulder.

She swung around, fist raised to deliver a punch, before her fist filled an immense hand and a voice came from its owner, a tall, beefy teen with a shock of unruly blond hair, skin the color of Arkoral, and shoulders that looked like construction I-beams.

"Shush, I'm on your side," said the man. "You really decked that guy, didn't you?"

Gretchen didn't respond.

"Okay, if you're not gonna talk to me, whatever. I'm just complimenting you on a job well done. What do you think I'm gonna do? Beat you up some more? Rape you? Look, kiddo, if I wanted to do either, I would have already. You didn't even know I was up here before you turned around."

Gretchen still didn't speak as she mastered her startledness and then her fear.

"Okay, fine, I guess those battle cries were some other girl. Look, I gotta go. _I_ have things to do. Follow if you want, but I'd like to hear your voice before you do," he snarled.

"Hey, wait!" Gretchen called, wiping the blood off her shirt.

-The Guest-

Fred yawned and stretched an arm out of bed to check his raincatcher. Empty. _Well, it was a pretty dry night, anyway._ He swung up and out of bed and headed out to the carrier, taking a different path than normal and allowing himself to get a little bit lost, both in his head and in the container maze of Guest Pelgo 5. _Time to sort my day out_, he thought.

There wasn't much to do today; it was a weekend and his job was nonessential, so he had the day off, and his job was one of only about four things he spent his time doing. The other three were working on risea, which he had finished last night, volunteering on the farm-slash-aircraft carrier, and a third one that he couldn't think of off the top of his head.

_God, I have no life_.

He sat down on the edge of a precariously leaning container, his feet dangling over the road while he took his morning smoke. He was pretty high up; he could see the harbor, down by the carrier, from his perch. The skyscraper winds whipped the acrid burning smell of synthetic nicotine away as Fred exhaled the smoke.

When he was done with his cigarette, he flicked it into the rust and stood up, coughing a bit from the tar and dust, then set off for the carrier. _I guess I may as well see what Isadora thinks of my files_.

"Hey," Fred said to a farmer when he arrived at the carrier. "You know where Isa is?"

"Yeah, she's in her office, mate," said the farmer.

"Great, thank you." Fred started for the tower on the edge of the carrier's deck, and took the stairs two at a time.

"Isadora? You get the disk?" he asked as he opened the door.

"I'm checking out the files right now. I have to say, it's good stuff, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with water consumption."

"It doesn't," Fred said smugly.

"Then how the hell is this plant supposed to help me?" Isadora asked, frustrated with Fred's proud obtuseness.

"Did you look at all the files yet?"

"Yes."

"Look again. It's got electrochemical organelles and an active transport chain for sodium and chlorine."

It took a moment for the information to sink in and another for Isadora to remember her basic chemistry. "Salt water."

"Yep."

"You cunning bastard. How long did it take you to come up with the idea?"

"About five seconds and eight beers to come _up_ with it, four years to finish it. You're gonna have to do the dirty work, though," Fred said, folding his arms.

"Oh, no you don't. You agreed to help me."

"I agreed to nothing, and that's a loose definition of nothing, and of agree."

"Okay, then your brilliance goes unappreciated. I need some cloning equipment to create a plant from this thing. I can't plant DNA."

"The only biosequencer on the entire Ark is on the Labs pelgo."

"Yeah?"

"Well, how the hell am I supposed to get into ArkLabs? I'm a parkour trainer, remember?"

"Yeah, I remember, but _you_ hold three Master's degrees and a doctorate, which means you're a smart guy. Now go apply your brainpower."

_Oh, come on. _"You can do it yourself!"

"No, I can't. I have to supervise the farm."

Fred sighed. _How the hell is it that she always manages to do this to me?_

_I'm so _weak_._

-The Scientist-

Amelie stepped out of the shower, her hands working a towel over her shoulder-length hair, and surveyed her room.

It was a mess. And that was if she was being kind to herself.

Her laptop was booted and running on her bed, her genetics program opened to her Arkoral notes and files and a hard copy of the carbonic base thesis strewn across her tangled comforter. Old shirts and pants were wrinkled over one another and the floor, and she couldn't, for the life of her, find her other shoe. A gym bag was crumpled out in the far corner of her room, and she hadn't pulled her swim equipment out yet, so it was currently drowning in a salt bath.

_I need to clean this place up a bit_, she said, opening her closet and pulling out some clothes. When she had adequately dressed herself, she opened two windows and let a breeze snake in off of the sea, taking the stale air with it on the way out of the opposite window. When she was satisfied with the air quality's steady improvement, she began to pick up her laundry and separated it into loads, then started the washing machine. _There goes about twenty rations of water. _Washing machines consumed a lot of water in the line of duty, and thus were some of the most expensive machines on Ark.

While she waited for her washing machine to process the clothes, she headed back into the kitchen adjoining both her bedroom and the whatever-you-call-a-washing-machine-room and made herself some breakfast; a bowl of rice-based cereal and some milk. She munched on a bite while she brought her laptop to the kitchen with her, and poked at the sequencer program, shifting Arkoral's alleles and loci.

The _ding_ of the antiquated washer-dryer alerted Amelie that the load was thoroughly rinsed and successfully desiccated, so she pulled it out and folded it while she carried the mass of clothing to her dresser, absently humming to herself.

The knock on her door startled her out of her trance and she rushed about, looking for something to put on.

"Miss Parker? Marm? It's urgent," an Irish man's muffled voice resonated through the thick aluminum of the door.

"Hold on!" she shouted back, ransacking her dresser drawers.

"What's the holdup?"

Amelie stopped and focused herself. Well, she wasn't _naked_, but she wasn't exactly _presentable_. All she had on was a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, with a sports bra under that. She shook her head and decided to at least put some jeans on.

When she finally tugged them up her legs and opened the door, a Security gendarme was standing there with a Kross, fidgeting and looking awkward. He snapped to a slightly greater state of attention and raised the automatic to a low ready stance.

"Marm, I'm Corporal MacLeod. It seems somebody wants to see you."

"Okay…"

"Can you come with me?"

Amelie nodded and he stepped out ahead of her, two more Gendarmes falling into lockstep behind them.

"Why all the security?"

"We've gotten rumors of Guest dissident activity in this area and wanted to ensure your safety."

_Bullshit. They get rumors every day, and the Guests haven't done anything to even live up to this reputation_. "Okay, thank you."

After a bit of walking, they reached the transport terminal of Alpha Pelgo, Amelie's home pelgo. There, they boarded a pure white ferry that whisked them across the Ark's primary canal system to the Resort Pelgos, where they were offloaded.

It was a sight to behold. Gracefully arching, futuristic buildings hewn from Arkoral and titanium eased gently into the skyline, while bioluminescent creatures sailed the tiny artificial rivers running between the walkways and lent a glow to them that was all their own. It was like a slice of old Earth, before the seas rose and covered it, but different. Soil was made of Arkoral and panels of wood, and rivers of salt and dihydrogen oxide. Founders and their children strolled hand-in-hand and some played in the water.

"Why exactly did they want to meet me here?"

"I haven't any clue, marm. All I was told is that I was to bring you here and you would be met by a Founder contact."

"This is all a bit cloak and dagger, don't you think, Mister MacLeod?"

"Marm, they don't give me a bonus ration pack to think; they give me a bonus ration pack 'cause I follow my orders and get the job done."

Amelie sighed and MacLeod let go of her arm, then gently pushed her forward.

"Go on, then. This is where I leave you. Like I said, I follow my orders, and I got lots more jobs to do."

"Thanks for the ride."

"Don't mention it," he said, cracking a smile as he walked past her, back to the boat.

_Guess I've got a date to keep,_ she thought to herself. _Don't know who with, or what for._

_But I'm gonna find out._

She did, eventually. There was a coffee shop about a mile down the pelgo's main concourse, and she stopped there and bought a drink to keep from getting too tired. Almost the moment she swiped her card, a man in a combat suit tapped her on the shoulder and handed her coffee to her.

"Miss Parker? I'm here to take you to your rendezvous point."

"Okay. Thank you for grabbing my drink."

"Don't mention it," he said.

The two of them walked in silence, the man's hand lightly girding the grip of what appeared to be a Tokmak-brand pistol. Tokmaks, while elegantly simple, had an unfortunate tendency to be very boxy; they seemed to take their design cues from Soviet Russian-style architecture in the 1960's and old American notchback muscle cars. They were, however, supremely balanced, had excellent range, and a large clip that could be emptied either very quickly or very deliberately, depending on the user's preference.

Not that Amelie knew any of this, though. All she really knew about guns was encapsulated in two sentences; if you pull the trigger it goes bang, and if you point it at another person when it goes bang, they die. She personally didn't care for the things.

They ended up on the shore of the pelgo, sitting in reclining chairs. Or, well, Amelie was sitting in a reclining chair. The gendarme was not. He stood sharply, a sore thumb in blues against the artificial sand.

A woman in a gray three-piece suit and a holster loaded with a revolver slid into the recliner next to Amelie and smiled.

"Good morning, Miss Parker."

"What do you need?"

"I'm sorry if you're a bit startled by the secrecy, but it has to do with Arkoral, and you and I both know what that means."

"It never leaves this beach."

"Good girl. Mister Braun?" she called to the gendarme. He pulled out a smooth black device with some speakers and knobs on it, adjusted the knobs, and flicked a switch. The area around Amelie and the suited woman filled with a slight _thrum_ming noise.

"Okay. Miss Parker, have you noticed anything… odd about your coworkers? Have they been acting suspicious at all?"

"You're going to need to define suspicious."

"Stealing research? Hiding secrets? Do they stop talking when you come near?"

"A few of them do, but I think that's just because they don't like me."

"Can I have a list of names?"

"I couldn't tell you off the top of my head. Why?"

"Because rumors have been propagating among the Guests that Arkoral is… sterile. As in, it's getting old, and it's no longer able to replicate or construct as efficiently.

"This is exactly the kind of thing that we don't need. Arkoral construction is the biggest sector of Guest work, and this kind of rumor could destroy the fragile peace we have with the Guests."

"And what do you want me to do about it?

"I want you to find the people who may have leaked this information."

The Radical

"No, but I'm telling you, he would have died! Arkoral's getting old, and so are the Guest pelgos. We need to change something before this place splits down the groove in Founders' Tower and becomes a giant aquarium ornament!" Chen shouted, gesturing vigorously at the man sitting next to him on the edge of his shipping container, an old friend from his last days on Ark's original construction team named Markus Flijcher. They had worked together in San Francisco, back when Ark was still being pieced together on land and the water had been lapping at the tops of the seawalls.

Markus slurped at the piping hot broth of his _pho_. "But how, Joey? Look, it's not like we can just snap our fingers. If Arkoral-_a is_ getting old, as you say, then we need a plan! Hell, what is it we're even supposed to fix?"

"I don't know, but… but we can't sit idly by while the industry on which this whole damn floating palace is built hits the fan!"

"Well, tell me what you need me to do when you know what it is." Markus sipped down the last of the broth and set the dish on top of Chen's air conditioner. "Until then, I can't help you. I'm a God-forsaken c's-and-d's high-school dropout, not a biologist."

"Thanks for your loyalty, at least."

"_Love, love me do, you know I love you, I'll always be true…_"

Chen groaned as Markus walked away, hands in his pockets as he sang the eighty-year old Beatles classic, his singing unaffected by his tempered Dutch accent. "You could have at least put the dish in the sink!"

"No!" Markus called back during a drum break, soloing on his knees.

Chen sighed, got up, and put the dishes in the 'sink', which was little more than an perforated aluminum box with a drainage grate on the bottom. It was full as of Chen placing the bowls inside. He sighed again, picked it up, and walked to the communal wash.

The communal wash was a sort of pool with some piping and motors providing a current that washed the water into an artificial aquifer, which then fed back into the pool. The plumber who maintained it got a cut of everyone's food rations, since the Founders wouldn't give him rations for servicing Guests, and it was arduous work. The aquifer was a carbon nanotube mesh set across the aperture of the main return pipe, and it often clogged or wore out, necessitating replacement. The filters, thankfully, were cheap to obtain; it fulfilled the objective to eliminate atmospheric carbon and used the near-infinite resource of solar power to enable electrochemistry and atomic-scale construction.

The wash's pool was often full of children rinsing dishes in the pool and playing in the slowly drifting soap-bubble icebergs. Today was no different. Chen walked down into the pool and set his box down in the water, then grabbed a scrubbing tool and began to work on each dish individually. First, he dipped the bowl in the water and sloshed it around a bit, then began to scrub it with a borrowed bristle brush. When he was done with that, he dried it and set it on the edge of the pool behind him. Wash, rinse and repeat; no pun intended.

When he was done, he rose from his knees and puffed out a long breath, feeling his aging body ache. Maybe it was time to go lie down for a bit. Have a smoke. Be done with the world for the rest of the day. That is, if the world was done with him.

**A/N: To the few ladies and gentlemen who are rocking back and forth in their seats, held enraptured by the wait for Pelgo 14's next chapter, I am sorry for the wait. Like I said, access to the computer. I am also sorry for the language and face-bopping in the opening chapter; Gretchen isn't exactly a total innocent, so don't hold that cute little nine-year-old image in your head.**

**So this is picking up a bit... I always feel like my stories pick up speed too fast, but I do know exactly where this one is going and how it will tie in with the actual game Brink.**

**And YAAAY, the tradition of MEGACHAPTERS has returned! *parties***


	7. The Revelation

Chapter 6: Revelation

-The Scientist-

It all made sense now.

Amelie didn't know what it was, or why it was, or how it was, but it did. She had swung out of bed and onto her laptop with a vengeance, her fingers running up and down the keyboard, running carbon bases up and down the DNA strands of Arkoral's base code so fast it _hurt_. She had blisters on her fingers, she swore it, as she sipped her coffee and watched the sun rise over the water, shining an elliptical reflection on the mirrored, salty surface. She smiled. Sunrises were pretty.

_...that was a girly moment_. She shook her head and rolled her eyes as she downed the last of her coffee. The sun's reflection was shifting, becoming a sphere, then splitting away like a cell dividing into two, its reflection fading away into shining waves as the immense ball of gas hung in space and Earth spun to face it. It helped remind her of how small their problems were, in comparison with how much could go wrong elsewhere in the universe.

She walked back into her house and checked her predicted growth rates again. _Yes_. _This should work._ The software was predicting a triplication of growth rate as soon as the Arkoral began accepting carbon and its enzymes went to work. It had been a simple matter of changing a single carbon base pair, which determined the structure of an enzyme that built the lipid bimembrane of each cell in the Arkoral and locked them together. This redesigned enzyme not only locked the cells with a carbon lattice (the reason for Arkoral's light-scattering properties), but it loaded the membranes with extra cholesterol analogues, which were primarily carbon, thus improving Arkoral's rigidity and providing freshly poured seed with a superior growth surface.

"Yes," Amelie said to herself, smirking. She was a bit surprised, to tell the truth. Not at Arkoral, for finally submitting to its superior, but for herself not having a big celebration. She just wanted to sequence it, test it, and hand in the results quietly and calmly.

So that was what she was planning to do. She got dressed, slipping on a pair of khakis, a forest-green t-shirt, and a labcoat, then slipping out the door into the pale light of dawn.

It wasn't far to the ferry terminal but it was far enough to be a bit of a hike. Here on Alpha Pelgo, all the apartments faced inward towards Founders Tower. She was on the east side of an inner loop, and the ferry terminal was on the far side of Pelgo 2, across the south bridge from Alpha Pelgo. So she was walking.

The sun rose higher, and it tripped lux-meters that folded open arcs of canvas to shade the concourse from the light, harsher and harsher as it rose higher and higher. Amelie continued down the middle of the deserted concourse as the umbrellas snapped open, towards her ultimate goal.

The city began to wake up, the Founders kids running out into the fountains in the centers of the plazas, parents watching from the windows and porches of their apartments as the children played. Amelie smiled as the kids rolled around in the cool salt water, fed up by a combination of capillary force and motors.

She finally reached the bridge, and crossed the half-kilometer of arched Arkoral, holding strong over an immense gap of ocean beneath. Ships were beginning their morning journeys through the waterways and arteries of the Ark, under the bridges and through the Pelgos' canals, and commerce was beginning to grind to life with them.

The bridge left her at a high sort of cliff construct at one end of Pelgo 2. She had to get down to the ferry terminal, which meant crossing through the main Founder marketplace and then the ferry ArkSec terminal. She started down the ramps and terraces, where hedges, trees, and all manner of fruit-bearing plants grew. A series of signs invited Ark's visitors and inhabitants to 'Go ahead, take a bite! All the plants you see here are edible!' Amelie shook her head, smiled, and finished her walk down the gleaming white Arkoral, and down into the bustling market. She was headed for the terminal and-

"Ooof!" she gasped as she bumped into a tall man with red skin, who followed her gasp in kind as he stumbled and dropped his bag. "I'm so sorry!" she said, touching his arm as a gesture of apology.

"That's fine," he said, bending to pick up his bag full of food. He hefted it up and smiled at her, looking her over. "Say, you wouldn't happen to be a scientist, would you?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Just... wondering. How do you like ArkLabs?"

"I like it well enough. In fact, I'm off to do some biosequencing," she announced proudly. _Finally, somebody cares about my work! Wait, but he- no, don't question it_.

"Biosequencing?" He nearly dropped his bag in surprise, but recovered it quickly and brought it back up.

"Yeah, it's this really cool machine. Only a few of ArkLabs's top biologists have access to it, and we use it to produce basic stuff for genetics experiments. Like sex cells, and then we combine them and form an embryo-"

"Wow, that's kinda cool," the Guest said. "I'm Fred, by the way," he offered, setting his bag down to stretch out a hand. Amelie took it and shook it vigorously.

"I'm Amelie. It's nice to meet somebody who really appreciates what I do."

"Yeah, I bet," he mused.

"So what do you do, then?"

"I train parkour for ArkSec," Fred said, slightly embarrassed. "My pre-Flood day job was molecular biology and genetics, though."

"Oh, that's so weird," Amelie exclaimed. "That _is_ mine!"

"Wow, what a crazy random happenstance! What are you working on right now?"

"Oh," she broke off, pausing awkwardly. "I really can't say. Like, confidential."

"Sorry I broached the subject, then."

"What about you?"

"Oh, I can't say either."

There was a long pause as the two thought to themselves.

_Well, he's actually... cool. He gets what I'm doing, he's nice..._

"Hey, would you mind-" she said.

"Do you want to-" Fred said at the same time. "You first," he said, recovering quickly from their jinx.

"Um... would you mind giving me your phone number?"

"Oh, sure." She handed her phone to Fred and he punched his number in.

They went about their separate ways after they realized they were in the middle of an intersection and there were many people angry at them.

-The Guest-

The entire damn minifridge was empty now.

Fred didn't know how it had happened, when it had happened, or when he had started feeling hungry, but after his protein bar this morning, he had realized he was out of food.

It was time to go get more.

Fred pulled on a pair of cargo shorts, a tee shirt, and a bandana, then swung out of his container and into the three-dimensional maze of the city on Guest Pelgo 5 as the sun peeked over the horizon.

Food was in the market on Pelgo 2, across the water from him, and the ferries weren't running before seven A.M. on weekends, so Fred had some time to kill. He killed it mercilessly by practicing his freerunning, skipping across the rooftops of the container city with ease and clambering across the metal framework of the titanic carriers the pelgo was built upon.

_You know, I really _should_ buy a helmet. Somebody might miss me when I'm gone_. He cleared the thought from his mind as he ran up a wall and over a gap that was too large for him to clear with a single jump. _Don't think about it. If you do, you jinx it and you die. Parkour isn't a science, it's an art. You have to feel it, feel where you are and where step two is on your road to your objective. You have to act and react to the world, not analyze it._

_Ooh, that's good. I gotta remember that for when I'm teaching my class tomorrow._ He stopped running and bent double, putting his hands over his head to suck in a huge breath and greet the sun as it split with the edge of the Earth.

His watch read 7:12 AM as he checked it. _Time to get going. Grab a ride on the first ferry of the day_. He started to slither down through the scaffolding holding the rusted shipping containers to their precarious perches. _It's a wonder more people don't die from tetanus here_.

He made it to the aircraft carrier at the core of the pelgo and climbed the steps down into the lower ring, where the ferries were just sputtering to life, their ancient gasoline engines now fueled by a synthetic hydrocarbon substitute, courtesy of ArkLabs.

_Which reminds me..._ Fred still needed to find a way into the restricted Labs pelgo. He stepped onto the ferry as the captain called all aboard, mulling over entry plans. It was heavily secured, he knew that much. Security gunboats patrolled around it endlessly, and finding a way in was unlikely to be easy. He supposed he could always try blasting his way in, but he'd need access to water-safe plastic explosives, and to get them, he needed to get into Security Tower's armory on Pelgo 1, which was locked _tighter _than Lambda Pelgo, where ArkLabs was located. At least he had access to Pelgo 1 for his teaching...

The boat reached the end of the line, and he stepped off as the gangplank folded down and the Guests went out to do their business, be it going to a weekendless job, such as Sanitation, Maintenance, or Transportation, or buying themselves food if they were wealthier.

Fred didn't have a particular grocery list today; he usually bought some sort of protein, such as beef, some good-quality bread and rice, and some flavoring goods or fruits such as soy or pepper sauces and mangoes. The very fact that he could afford _meat_ set him apart from the other Guests on its own. Cows were expensive. No, they were _damn_ expensive. A single cow took years to reach a level at which it could produce food for the people of Ark, and consumed millions of calories' worth of grass during that time. Plus, as with eating any first consumer, you only got a ten-percent return on Nature's investment in that creature. These were basic rules of biology Fred had learned in seventh grade, but were made important beyond their level by the premium of space and energy on Ark. Most Ark-dwellers, especially the Guests, were consequentially vegans by either choice or necessity. To defeat vitamin deficiencies from the lack of animal protein in the Guest diet, the Founders enriched their bread and soup with synthetic protein and vitamins, but it wasn't the same. The synthetic source of most vital nutrients in the human diet left many Guests slightly malnourished and sickly.

Fred didn't have to jump through those hoops, thank God. He laid down some ration coupons at a stall, and picked out a few small cuts of beef from the vendor, a small Chinese lady who smiled, accepted the currency substitute, and promptly pulled down the cow's carcass and set about dismembering it with a cleaver that doubled as a machete. She packed his order in brown biodegradable plastic and bagged it for him, the smile never leaving her face. Fred had to admit, he liked the old woman.

Next stall over, he encountered a fruit vendor. He picked out an orange, an apple, and two mangoes, and was promptly bowled over by a dirty-blonde blur in a labcoat as he turned about to go to the next stall.

"Ooof!" the woman gasped as the two of them impacted. "I'm so sorry!" she said, touching his arm as a gesture of apology.

"That's fine," Fred said. _Almost killed me, lady._ He put his thoughts of sudden anger out of his mind and slid his hand through the straps of his bag, looking up at her. She wasn't half bad looking. She fit the bill of the 'nerdy chick' stereotype quite well, with thick-rimmed and lensed glasses, a slightly angular face on which braces wouldn't have looked out of place at all framed by her unkempt spelt-colored hair, and a decidedly unremarkable figure.

She had an ArkLabs badge on her labcoat, though, and that was enough to make Fred fall in love with her on its own.

"Say, you wouldn't happen to be a scientist, would you?" Fred said. _Could it really be so easy?_

"Yeah, why?"

"Just... wondering. How do you like ArkLabs?" Fred was beginning to formulate a plan.

"I like it well enough. In fact, I'm off to do some biosequencing," she announced, with pride in her voice at somebody actually asking her about her life.

"Biosequencing?" _Are you Goddamned serious? How in the hell-_

"Yeah, it's this really cool machine. Only a few of ArkLabs's top biologists have access to it, and we use it to produce basic stuff for genetics experiments. Like sex cells, and then we combine them and form an embryo-" _I know what a biosequencer is, damn it!_

"Wow, that's kinda cool," Fred said, stifling his excitement. "I'm Fred, by the way," he offered, setting his bag down to stretch out a hand. The woman took it and shook it vigorously.

"I'm Amelie. It's nice to meet somebody who really appreciates what I do."

"Yeah, I bet," he mused.

"So what do you do, then?"

"I train parkour for ArkSec," Fred said, feigning embarrassment and rubbing the back of his neck as a fitting gesture. "My pre-Flood day job was molecular biology and genetics, though." _Common interests. Come on._

"Oh, that's so weird," Amelie exclaimed. "That _is_ mine!" _Yes._

"Wow, what a crazy random happenstance!" Fred said, knowing, somehow, that it wasn't. "What are you working on right now?"

"Oh," she broke off, pausing awkwardly. "I really can't say. Like, confidential."

"Sorry I broached the subject, then."

"What about you?"

"Oh, I can't say either."

There was a long pause as the two thought to themselves.

_Okay, I gotta figure out a way to get her to get me into ArkLabs, and... well, it's not exactly chivalrous, but..._

"Hey, would you mind-" she said.

"Do you want to-" Fred said at the same time. "You first," he said, recovering quickly from their jinx. _Gotta get this plan rolling_.

"Um... would you mind giving me your phone number?"

"Oh, sure." She handed her phone to Fred and he punched his number in.

They went about their separate ways after they realized they were in the middle of an intersection and there were many people angry at them.

-The Engineer-

"_Shit!_" Parson shouted as he tore down the narrow underwater corridor, the gendarmes in pursuit firing round after round after him.

How exactly had he gotten to this point?

Well, he had been counting his heartbeats as a way to keep time. He was able to reestablish some sense of time when he realized that they were delivering the food every fifty thousand beats. He was counting in groups of one-hundreds.

It wasn't like he had anything better to do.

So he had waited, and as soon as his door had slid open, he smacked the delivering gendarme in the face with a food tray, yanked him inside, and brought one of his bedposts down on the poor, unlucky bastard's face until it caved in.

_Sorry, brother. It was you or me, _he eulogized as he stripped the dead man of his body armor and weapons.

When his eyes had adjusted to the light, he stepped out into the hall and brought his red-dot equipped CARB-9 submachine gun up, expecting a team of gendarmes to be in cover behind the slight lips in front of each cell door _a la_ _A New Hope_. Instead, he found an empty, dead end hallway.

"Hello?"

There was no response.

He turned around and activated the door control panel on the wall directly behind him. The door to his cell slid shut, locking a nearly naked man without a face inside and a body-armored escapee outside. _Well, no turning back now._

He began to walk down to the end of the hall, which fed into a circular hub of domed, reinforced glass. Fish were swimming about freely, and there were torpedo turrets scanning outside the flattened torus of glass, visible-spectrum lasers forming a red fence in the water around the prison as the turrets tracked for submarine invasion or surface assault by ferries or gunships. He was surprised that there weren't more guards patrolling. _I never expected escaping prison to be this easy._

Of course, that was when a pair of guards rounded the corner.

_Shit._

He decided to play it cool, keeping his SMG low and nodding at them as they passed. They nodded back.

_Oh, you've gotta be fucking kidding me._ He shook his head as he walked down the torus toward the hallway from which the guards had come. He took the steps in said hallway two at a time as he ascended into the prison's lobby, then nodded at the receptionist, who smiled back.

"Are you checking out?" she asked

Parson froze. "Uhh... yeah," he stuttered, after a short pause.

"Let me scan your RFID tag, then." She got up and passed a barcode scanner-like device over a patch on his chest with a circuit-board inlay. She frowned as the device beeped and began to display information.

"Sir, I'm going to have to detain you for a moment," she said, raising a pistol in her free hand. Parson barely registered the movement before his free hand wrapped around her wrist and his CARB-9 arm's elbow connected with her face. The jerk backwards combined with his loose grip on her wrist forced her to let go of the pistol and it slid into Parson's hand. He flicked his SMG's safety off and raised it as the sirens started going off.

_There goes the easiest prison break in history._

Parson ran towards the front door, but it was sealed with an emergency blast door. _Alternate route of egress, alternate route of egress!_ He started running, drilling the responding ArkSec blues with concentrated fire from his stolen pistol and CARB-9.

_Okay, I'm loose in a prison facility full of pissed-off guards with only small arms and a ballistic vest to fight back with, and absolutely no plan._

So that was how he had gotten to shouting "_Shit!_" and running down a narrow corridor with what seemed like the entire ArkSec gendarmerie bearing down on him.

He kept on running and they kept on shooting until he reached a room at the end of the corridor. It was what appeared to be an underwater transport hub. Parson grinned, grabbed a hydroscooter, and started emptying his CARB-9 into the glass, chipping it until it cracked, and the water caved it in.

He surfaced with the bubbles and a whoop as he returned to freedom.

_Now what?_

-The Daughter-

"Who are you?" Gretchen called to the mysterious pale teenager as they walked down the long, empty hallways of the Orphanage. Gretchen constantly scanned around, looking down adjoining corridors and into rooms on this hall. _They must have used this place for something else once..._

"Just call me Devin," he grunted back.

"No last name?"

"Well, do you have one?"

"I do, but... well, given the reaction my family got on land, I'd rather not say."

"Well, I'd rather not say, too." He moved swiftly, swinging through the pipes, ladders, and broken metal of the Orphanage's enclosure with ease.

"Whatever. Not like your dad was a Guest before the Guests."

"You just told me _why_ people hated your family but didn't tell me your name." They eventually reached a bent panel of metal that served as a balcony out over the edge of the pelgo, and Devin perched on it. Gretchen folded her legs and sat. _Criss-cross, applesauce._

"Yeah?"

"Lesson one. Don't tell anybody anything, especially if it undermines something else. Kids here don't get by on honesty and sugar and spice and all that. They get by on force, bullshit, and secrets." He looked pained as he stared out over the sandbar sea formed by the breakwater.

"How long did it take you to learn that?"

"Not long. The more people know about you, the more they can use against you."

"You sound like you know a lot about that."

"I do. More than I want to." His shoulders tensed. It was an immeasurable movement, but it turned his silhouette from that of an outcast to that of a panicked animal, looking for any way to defend itself from everything. He looked up and flicked a lock of hair out of his eyes, staring at the sky. "So, how exactly did you wind up here?" he asked.

"Well, my parents used to have a lot of money, but when the seas rose, it didn't really matter anymore. They took a boat out here, but... well, they died." Gretchen felt a mysterious absence of emotion at this. It wasn't that she didn't care. In fact, she felt as though any second now she might break down and cry. There was... _something_ keeping her from it, though. "And the guy who took me here gave me up, so... here I am."

"I'm guessing you wanna get out, then?"

"Yeah."

"I'll give you a tip, then; don't. Nobody ever does. They say that Founders often come to see if there're any kids they might like to adopt, but they haven't come in over ten years. Trust me on that."

"You've been here for ten years?" Gretchen was stunned. _When?-_

"When I was six, my parents gave me up. I was born on the Ark and my da' lost his job on ArkConstruction. They couldn't provide for me anymore, so I got to go say hi to all those assholes that you met. Oh, joy."

"That's awful!" Gretchen cried, stunned. Devin was... nice. _Why would anybody give him up, especially if he was their son? Your kids are supposed to be a priority..._

"Yeah, well, those other kids have it pretty bad too. It's just that they try to compensate. I don't. I could, but I don't," he concluded, flexing an arm.

"Have any of them tried to get out?"  
>"One, once. He led a little rebellion. Took over the island for a day before an ArkSec team tranquilized him and dragged him in. They doubled the security detail and installed a whole new security system as a response."<p>

"Oh."

"Yeah."

The two unlikely allies sat in silence as the tide crashed against the Arkoral fifty feet below them. _Fssssssshhhhhhhhhh... Fssssssshhhhhhhhhh... _Gretchen gritted her teeth against the solitude of the waves. "Do you know what this place used to be for?"

"No. I wish I did."

"Oh. Well, maybe... maybe if we find out, it might make a getaway easier?" Gretchen had no idea how Devin would react. He might sigh and shake his head and list all the reasons why that wouldn't work, or he might become enraged and punch her and send her toppling into the shallows to break her body on the rock-hard Arkoral, or he might simply leave and return to the Orphanage and never speak to her again.

Devin chose kindness.

He smiled at Gretchen and tousled her hair. "Sure, kid. Might as well."

-The Radical-

The ArkSec forces patrolled around the construction site as Chen and Markus directed the cranes in placing the containers in neat stacks, sure to leave small passages that served as alleys or bridges. The two had been volunteering as Guest construction contractors in their spare time since they had arrived; ArkConstruction only did work on the Founder side of the Wall. A bit unfair, considering that they were almost entirely staffed by Guests.

Every time the Guests decided to erect a new complex, they had to jump through about a million hoops to get it built. First, they had to submit plans, then a bill of materials. Then, the ArkCon Office of External Works had to go over them, approve them, allocate materials, and then hire out a team of ArkSec guards. They had made it through on this particular building.

For the past three weeks, the cranes had been lowering pontoons into the water in a specific pattern, then anchoring them to the artificial seabed of the Ark and welding them together into a cohesive frame. Once that was done, they bridged the space with rebar, space-filled with concrete, and then started to lay down the steel shipping containers.

As they set down the containers, the volunteer team, all very proficient with construction tools as a result of their day jobs, welded them together according to the plans. By the time they were done, the building looked like a house built from LEGO bricks, in bright, vivid colors and boxy shapes. After a few days, the heat, humidity, and sun winnowed the paint and dyes from the steel, and it faded, from a fresh new landmark to a structure that looked no different from the rest of the pelgo's buildings.

It was a bit of a metaphor for the Guests.

Markus flicked his welding mask up as he finished a particularly long joint along the equal edges of two containers.

"Joey!" he shouted down.

"What?" Chen asked, looking up at his friend.

"Raise me another block!"

Chen flashed Markus a thumbs-up and waved to the crane operator, who waved back to signify his attention. He then pointed to Markus' location, and mimed lowering a brick into place. The operator complied, picking up a midnight-blue Hanjin container, consulting his copy of the plans, and lowering it on top of the layer in the position required of it, leaving about four inches of space between the hanging block and the welded one. Markus climbed up to the point where the two blocks were about to meet and pushed them about a bit, until he was satisfied they were even. He started to rotate his arm, hand out flat and palm up. The crane operator lowered the block into place and Markus began welding.

Construction had lost its wonder for Chen a few months after arriving on the Ark. Before, he had designed some very nice homes in the PRC for Communist Party bureaucrats, but when the Flood came, architecture and building became a job, not a joy. _And every time I think about the past, I think about Qian... _He sighed. _I need to come to terms with her ghost before she eats me alive. If there were any temples on Ark I'd become a monk._

He woke himself from his daze and checked the plans against the building, walking in a slow circle around it. It all checked out. He smiled a little bit to himself. The part that never lost the magic was the part where you realized it was all coming together.

Markus swung down from the crate he had been welding and returned to Chen. "Any jobs for me, boss man?"'

"None in particular, at the moment. I suppose you could go work on the interior." The interior work in Guest buildings tended to be... poor. Hand-welded steel walls and poorly smoothed edges meant that, to say the least, real estate prices were down. Markus could do a mean job with a blowtorch and handheld radial sander, though, producing homes of livable quality with only a few tools and a spare sheet of diamond 100-grit sandpaper. He was a true master of making do.

Markus nodded and set off, retrieving a radial sander and some sandpaper from a bin near the construction site. There was work to do. There always was.

There always would be, until the Earth dove its death spiral and the Sun burned out.

**A/N: Sorry for the week-long wait to those of you who actually read this thing. I update regularly. Sometimes.**

**And yeah, reviews are kind of nice. So do your part and get that Reviews number up above 8! Come on, guys! I know you can do it!**

**...losing faith... every second...**


	8. Force Equals Mass

**-The Engineer-**

Parson crawled ashore via the Founder pelgo's boat launch and collapsed, soaked to the bone and gasping for air. He had no idea how much water he had swallowed, but all of it had burned and it had tasted like vomit.

_Speaking of which..._ Parson dragged his tired body to the edge of a pier and hurled the mostly-liquid contents of his stomach into the ocean blue from which they had come. _Ugh. That burned._

He heaved himself to his feet and stood on shaky legs. It had been too long since he had actually done any aerobic activity; he had only been doing strength exercises during his internment in the Ark's prison. _I got to... fifty pushups a day?_ He put the thought out of his head with a little effort; he was too tired to think right now. Right now he needed to hide.

_But where_?

He ducked down into a boating supply closet full of fishing tackle and tried to recover, breathing deeply and attempting to force himself into an even cardiovascular rhythm. _God, I'm out of shape._ When he stopped panting, he burst out of the closet, checked his corners with the CARB-9, and started looking for something to give him a sense of location. He knew he had swam up from the prison pelgo, and as far as he knew, he had swam directly up. So it was reasonable that this pelgo wasn't too far out. Or he had swam further along the water than he thought. Either one would do.

He found the boathouse exit and leapt out into the light of the pelgo's deck, then immediately realized that he was blind.

"AAH!" he shouted, and he ran backwards, ducking back into the boathouse before he realized that it was night.

"Okay. Losing my mind. Captivity. No sense of time." He reloaded the CARB-9 and made sure the action was clear, then flicked it on SAFE and slung it by its strap over his back. Maybe his ArkSec duds would get him through the pelgo. _Yeah. Yeah, that's it._

_But to what?_

_To the girl_, he said to himself, feeling dual pangs of guilt and purpose rush through his belly, invigorating him and crushing him all at once.

_To the girl_.

He stepped out into the blinding darkness.

**-The Daughter-**

"Devin!" Gretchen shouted.

"What?" he called back.

"I found something!"

They were currently a floor up. Devin had found a weak spot in said floor while they were climbing in between the it and the acoustic tile, and had torn his way through with a glass knife. They were now exploring the new area.

Devin swung round the corner into the room Gretchen was in, and she pointed to the object. It was a flat-screen computer monitor with a keyboard directly beneath. Devin pressed a key and it jolted to life, displaying an absolutely_ prehistoric_ GUI in the form of a command line.

-CCTV surveillance active

-enter command

Devin looked at Gretchen. "Nice find, kid."

help, Devin typed.

-feed: open camera video feed (1-9)

-quit: exit current terminal session

-user: open user account. best done with superior human interface equipment.

feed

-1-9?

1

The screen flickered and they were looking at the receptionist's desk. She was blowing bubble gum and playing games on her computer to occupy himself.

2

The screen flickered again and Devin and Gretchen saw two burly teens sparring. _Probably some of Asshole's pals._

"This is awesome!" Devin whispered, as he checked the rest of the feeds. "You should see if there's anything else in this room."

**-The Scientist-**

Amelie's hand hovered over her phone as her anticipation built. She couldn't quite remember the last time she had felt this nervous. She thought it was when she had asked the Japanese exchange student in her science class out, but she wasn't sure. It may have been some other time. All she knew was that she had felt similarly excited and worried at once to the way she was feeling now.

She had sent Fred a message; 'hey, it's amelie. science geek you ran into at market? wanna grab lunch tomorrow?'

The phone buzzed and she snapped it up, nearly dropping it in her convulsive, graceless movement. She would have blushed if there had been anyone else there to see her. Instead, she snapped open the device and read the text.

'Sure' it said.

Amelie felt a thrill build in her chest. _I got a date with a guy who doesn't think I'm weird_. That certainly hadn't happened since high school.

She did a little wriggle-dance on the spot in her excitement. _This calls for celebration_.

When was the last time she had celebrated?

_God. That was in high school too..._

There weren't a whole lot of good memories she had of high school. She had left her yearbooks, textbooks, and memorabilia behind in Michigan when the Flood drowned it like it had the rest of the upper Midwest. Sure, she had been an honors student, graduating top of her local International Baccalaureate program and finishing out her fourth year in a college-placement program as well as interning in a gene therapy program at the hospital in her city. She had been valedictorian of her graduating class and had gone into college like a cat into a room full of mice, earning a doctorate in molecular biology and a complimenting Master's in environmental engineering at Cambridge.

All that really meant to anybody who talked to her for any length of time was that she was boring.

But now here was somebody who didn't think so.

She smiled at her little victory over life and prepared a text back. 'how about one pm, meet me at the market? i know a pretty good sandwich place near there.'

'Sounds good. See you there' he replied.

_Aw, yeah. That's right. I'm showing all of you dead guys who mocked me who's boss. Cause I got a date and you DIED!_

Amelie jumped up and danced around her tiny apartment in happiness.

After a bit of this display of childish enthusiasm, it was back to business for her, though. She still had to turn in the new Arkoral prototype.

So she headed down to the ferry terminal out to the Labs pelgo and caught the last one out, the files safely stored on her laptop's drive. She had to walk a short ways down the boardwalk to reach it, but once she was in the pelgo's cafe, which was as far as the wi-fi reached from the Labs complex, she uploaded the files.

And that was that.

Or so Amelie thought.

**-The Guest-**

_Oh, what have I gotten myself into?_

He stared at the glowing text on his phone's screen and blinked. _I may have just ruined a nice girl's life._

_For a good cause? _he tried justifying.

_No. But it's for a cause, and I can't let this get in the way. This is for the Guests._

He scowled and flicked his flash drive through his fingers. _This data could fix it all._

He had no idea it would only make things worse.

**A/N: Sorry about the wait; I didn't have P14 on my Kindle and I was in Cannon Beach. Great place, but lame interwebs access. Sorry about the shorter chapter length. Chapter 8 is about the same, but Chapter 9 will be normal length.**


	9. Times Acceleration

**-The Engineer-**

The waves whipped past Parson's boat as he opened up the throttle, shooting out towards the walled enclave at the edge of Pelgo 13.

Also known as the Orphanage.

Also known as the new home of the little girl.

Parson didn't even know her name, but he was gonna get her out. He had sworn to any force in the universe that would witness it that he would get her out of there. Even if he was the guy who had given her up, he would make sure he was the guy who got her back.

He heard sirens starting up and powerful engines beginning to churn the water behind him. Good; ArkSec's reaction was in line with his predictions. He'd have about two minutes before they closed the gap with his boat and blew him away. He'd be at the Orphanage in one and a half.

No, that wasn't empty hope; he had actually done the math.

He had found a very helpful map, stolen a boat from the launch where he had climbed up onto the pelgo, and opened it up as soon as he was free of the marina.

Being an engineer counted for a few things in a post-apocalyptic world. Namely, the ability to steal vehicles from his contemporaries at will.

_Don't think about morality, don't think about morality, don't think about morality._

He willed the throttle of the civilian watercraft to open wider as he skipped over the glassy sea at the core of the Ark at seventy knots, his eyes burning as the air forced itself across them.

The police cutters were in range to start up with their megaphones, promising him safety and minimal charges if he cut his power and turned himself in. _For an escaped convict? Sure._ He hunched over in his seat, lowering his head in case they started shooting.

The shallows around the pelgo came suddenly. One second, he was screaming across the surface, the next, Parson's boat had been divested of the bottom of its hull and he was now screaming through the air to land on an Arkoral beach, near the sand-line.

He disentangled himself from the wrecked boat, checked his CARB-9, and set off for the towering circular enclave.

**-The Daughter-**

"Find anything interesting yet?" called Devin from down the hall.

"No," Gretchen shouted back. She was still investigating the empty room in which they had found the CCTV unit. "Have you guessed what this place used to be yet?"

"No. I think it may have been an office building once, though. Hard to say. There's just a lot of empty spaces and stuff, really."

"Hmm." Gretchen ducked under a counter with a view to the hall, reached for a box, and threw it open. She rummaged around in it, running her hand through some old folders to see if they contained anything interesting. There was nothing in _those_. She checked another box. Empty as well.

There were a series of sudden sharp _pop_s from the CCTV terminal.

Was that _shooting_?

Gretchen rose to her feet quickly, banging her head against the underside of the counter and on something taped to the underside. It fell and she grabbed it, the hefty weight and roughened feel of a pistol grip filling her hand as her small fingers closed around it.

It was shooting!

"DEVIN!" she shouted. She heard his footsteps begin to swell in volume as he pounded down the hall.

Was that _the Engineer?!_

_I thought he _left_ me!_

But there he was, pinning the receptionist against the wall and forcing her to open it.

He was coming for her!

Devin suddenly burst into the room, his fists raised. He calmed down after ensuring that there were no foes to be eliminated within the room and lowered them, focusing in on the camera.

"Who the hell is _that guy _and what is he _doing_ here?" Devin exclaimed.

"That's the Engineer, and he's our ticket out of here. Come on!" She grabbed Devin's wrist and jerked him toward the exit, shoving the pistol into his hand as she tugged him from the room.

The Radical

"Joey!"

"What? Chen shouted back to Markus. Markus held up a battered old tablet with an Ark news channel running on it. The camera angle was fairly poor; the reporter's head was mostly in the picture, but her chin and most of her right cheek was cut off by the frame. The camera was trained on the doors of the Orphanage as Security gendarmes set up a cordon, raising riot shields and attaching bulletproof plastic plates to the fronts of their rifles.

"_-shots fired on Pelgo 13, the Orphanage; Ark Security is moving in on the building right now. They've told us that a man recently escaped from one of Security Tower's satellite prisons and stole a boat, then headed straight here and barricaded himself into the building. They can't say any more-"_

"Is that...?"

"Yeah. Some guy broke out, got loose, and ran for the hills. Not exactly a smart place to-"

"_He's coming out!"_ Guns began to blaze to life, the authoritative bark of Security weapons cutting the air as the man exiting the building opened fire. There was a young girl, maybe ten, clinging to his back as he ran out towards the cordon. A boy in his late teens followed, spitting salvos from a Belgo machine pistol as he dashed across the courtyard. The madman carrying the girl on his back hurled something at the Security shields, and they broke and ran before-

_Boom._

There was suddenly a smoking hole in the cordon. Security officers were reeling, unconscious, or dead. The boy, girl, and running man slipped out and ran down the main road of the pelgo as the Security officers slowly recovered.

The sound returned to the video and the cameraman began running to follow the Security personnel who had given chase. The three escapees were running for the Security boats on the launch.

Chen laughed. "They're incompetent! They let a little _girl_ get past them!" He let out a jolly laugh. Markus was snickering at the failure of the cordon as well.

The cameraman stopped running; his ragged breathing was obviously audible. He zoomed in on the escapees as they reached the end of the pier, jumped into one of the boats, and started it a few moments later.

Markus laughed, held up a middle finger to the stunned Security men and women as the cameraman panned back across the crowd, and saved the video.

A man walking by asked Markus to replay the video. The Dutchman happily obliged.

Eventually they drew a small crowd of people who were eager to admire ArkSec's failure.

Eventually the celebration of ArkSec's failure began.

Eventually the drinks came out.

**-The Scientist-**

She ran her fingers through her hair again, sighing. Maybe it was the fact that it was the first date she had gotten in a while, but she was catching herself obsessing over her appearance. A lot. She hadn't been this damned... _girly_ since high school!

She shook her head and rolled her eyes to herself.

First date. She had asked him to a sandwich place, so obviously she was going to have to pick something casual. No big difficulty for her considering the fact that she hadn't bought a dress for years and only owned pants, the majority of which were khakis.

_Alright, Fred, I hope you don't have a problem if your girlfriend wears cargoes to your date._

She slipped into the pants, tousled her hair again, and grunted. _Acceptable._

Amelie grabbed her _pink, white, gray... blue_ jacket and stretched her arms through the sleeves as she opened the door and slammed it behind her in one fluid, pirouetting motion.

_Alright. Time to catch a train._

She began to quickly stride down the white boulevard as it glittered under the artificial light. The train station was about a half-kilometer away, so she had some distance to cover.

She arrived just as the sleek monorail train was pulling into the station, its burnished bright gray aluminum skin reflecting the moon into Amelie's face. She boarded the shining train and took a seat in one of the simple injection-molded Arkoral buckets. They had only used the miracle material on the inside, since it naturally had a high drag coefficient due to its structure. It annoyed her when it grabbed her khakis as she sat up. It was rough stuff, despite its appearance, and it wasn't easy to burnish down; it tended to flake without a grain.

The train ride ended quickly, and Amelie got to experience the trouser-grabbing sensation of sitting up off of Arkoral once again as she slid from the seat and out the door, into the market. At night, the restaurants and clubs opened up their doors, filling the breezy ocean air with throbbing bass and classical music competing for dominance in the street. Crowds of Founders and wealthier Guests swarmed through the plaza on their way from one place to the next.

So it was fairly loud.

Amelie made her way down to the statue in the center of the market and sat down, dipping her feet in the fountain.

It wasn't long before Fred arrived. He was wearing a black shirt and jeans, and he sat down next to her.

"So what's this Korean place you wanted to show me?"

Amelie smiled. "Follow me," she said, taking his hand and setting off through the crowd. It wasn't long before they reached a small, cozy eatery. There was a sign in Hangul over the entrance, and a smaller one beneath in English that read 'Crazy Kim's'. They walked in and were immediately greeted with a gust of Korean from behind the kitchen window, presumably from Crazy Kim. A young girl appeared and led Fred and Amelie to a table, supplied them with menus, and returned a few moments later with two black teas laced with coconut milk, the only drink served at the restaurant besides its components.

Fred smiled at her from behind the table and scanned the menu, as did Amelie. When the serving girl returned, they ordered. Fred got the kalbi flanksteak and Amelie got a small bowl of bibimbap.

"I'm guessing you must come here often?" Fred asked.

"Yeah. In my honest opinion, it's one of the best restaurants on the Ark."

"Well, I haven't really been to many restaurants on Ark."

"Seriously? Why not?" Amelie leaned forward in curiosity.

"Guests don't tend to get out much."

She looked up, a bite of some sort of pickle pinned between her chopsticks, and stared at him. "You're a Guest?"

Fred looked up over his steak and chuckled. "Wow, no red-skin shunning?"

"No, I would never! It's just… well…"

"That I live on a rusty artificial island? It could be worse," he said, sealing that particular branch of the conversation with a smile. The two continued to eat in silence for a few minutes before he piped up.

"So what have you been doing at work?"

"Nothing much as of now. I mean, I used to be working on a really tough project, but…"

"What?"

"Can't say. Confidentiality agreements and all that," she huffed around a mouthful of food before swallowing. "Kinda stupid. I mean, if you didn't want me to tell people about what I'm working on, why am _I_ working on it in the first place?"

Fred nodded his assent. "Yeah, in my job, that happened a lot. Trying to engineer higher crop yields and stuff out of really heavily gee-emmed plants. We weren't allowed to tell anyone for fear that they were spies or something like that. Some of the plants were so plasmid-heavy that they took twice as long to grow."

"Yeah. The people who do genetic modification work are lucky, though. I had a serious shit of a plant to contend with."

"I feel your pain."

They stood up, having finished their food, and Amelie laid down an Ark debit card. The teenage waitress collected their payment and ran the card before handing it back to Amelie. She nodded at the waitress and looked at Fred. "We should do this again sometime."

"Let me walk you home," he said.

Amelie smiled and offered him her hand. "Most of the ride is a monorail."

"Who cares?"


	10. Empires Have Fallen For Less

**-The Guest-**_  
><em>

_Fuck_.

No, seriously.

He felt Amelie shift next to him and grimaced. It wasn't like he hadn't _enjoyed_ the whole event, but... he felt guilty. Guilty for doing what felt like taking advantage of a sweet girl. The date had been fun, for God's sake! He actually liked her!

And here he was, a betrayer tangled in her bedsheets, staring at her ceiling as the sun came up and cast the world in gray before returning color to the world and to human eyes. He had a duty to execute, and he didn't want to do it.

So what was a man to do?

What was a _Fred Nelson _to do?

As far as he could figure, there weren't a lot of possibilities. He needed access to the ArkLabs complex, and she had it. He could take her I.D. card, check himself past the ferry, and then shoot his way in. He could get her to take him in as a guest, but he guessed that would take a lot longer than just this one time. He could come clean to her and risk losing his one shot.

None of these were on a fast enough timetable. None of them guaranteed results. None of them ended well for either Fred or Amelie.

He puffed out his cheeks and blew out a breath in exasperation. He wanted a cigarette.

No.

He didn't want one. Imagine that. Too nervous for one.

Amelie snuggled up to his side and he started formulating an exit plan.

_First things first; I gotta find her card and my drive. Second, I need to get to the ferry terminal before she realizes it's missing. Third, gotta get into ArkLabs and get that risea seed sequenced._

He nodded to himself and slipped out of the bed.

That was, of course, when she woke up.

**-The Radical-**

There it was again. That damned double happiness glyph.

Chen roared, but it came out like a moan. He swung out of his bed and gripped his face, wiping away sweat he had excreted in the night. He needed a bath, he needed to talk to Markus, he needed Qian back in his life-

He realized that he wasn't in his apartment.

_So I hallucinated that glyph? Then where in the _hell_ am I?_

He looked around and coughed, clearing a great deal of rust dust from his face and his lungs. He was lying on the ground in the road, along with several other people. Many of them were in various states of undress and consciousness. That is, if it could be called consciousness.

Chen woke up when a sudden impact with the side of his head cleared his mind of whatever fog he was in.

"Get up, Guest. You got work to do. No, never mind; it's obvious you're too hammered to help with whatever the fuck it is you do," a gendarme spat, voice rich with contempt and malcontent.

Chen climbed to his feet unsteadily.

"Do you have any idea what happened last night?" he slurred, lurching toward the guard and grabbing his shoulders.

"No! And even if I did, I wouldn't tell you! You smell like a gallon of shit!"

Chen groaned as a jolt of pain shot through him with the realignment of his inner ear. He fell to his knees and retched into the dust, disgorging a jet of alcohol and acid from his throat. He was too tired for it to burn as it went up, but it still did. He continued to vomit until his stomach felt like somebody had rolled it up like a recalcitrant tube of toothpaste, getting _every last cent I paid for this damn thing_ out.

He puked again and stood up, legs shaky and head throbbing.

_There must have been alcohol._

Chen didn't react too well to alcohol.

He staggered down the road aimlessly until he found Markus, who was lying naked in the communal wash, the filter jammed by vomit and the water line cut off.

"Markus, you idiot," Chen gasped, "wake up!" He slapped Markus across the face and Markus gasped, then started coughing up water from the wash that he must have swallowed last night. He planted a knee, then levered himself up.

"Joey, where are my pants?"

"You lost them playing strip poker? How the hell am I supposed to know?"

Markus looked around, his face bright red in a splotchy parabola from his jawbone through his nose. Despite its obvious effects on him, Markus could hold his liquor. Chen had found that out the hard way when the Hollander _destroyed_ him in a drinking match back in San Francisco. Markus had gone home in his own car, while Chen had woken up on Markus's couch, having shamed the Chinese people in their little competition among men.

Markus finally located his pants; they were thrown over one of the washboards near the pool at the center of the wash. His boxers were there too. He pulled both articles of clothing on and yawned.

"Well, that was a hell of a night," Markus remarked.

"Yeah. What happened?"

"I can't remember completely. I think it had to do with something down by GP2. Some guy broke into the Founder complex across the water. Kicked Security's ass. At least, that's what I remember from before I was drowned in saltshine."

"Saltshine? _Aiya,_ that explains the hangover then," Chen replied. The Ark had a strict no-alcohol-for-Guests policy, but as men are wont to do when denied intoxicants, they began to brew their own, using salt water and fermenting sugar from their bread rations using yeast stolen from ArkFoods. It was a double whammy when it came to intoxication because not only was it alcoholic, it was based on salt water, which doubled its dehydrating power.

"Yeah. I don't get hammered that easily, but that stuff is… just... ugh." He made some vague hand motions to indicate his level of intoxication, but then abandoned all hope to communicate the liver-scourging, blood-thinning power of saltshine.

The two of them rejoined the streets, evidence of the bacchanal still strewn freely through the dust. ArkSec had come during the night, and was maintaining order while they handcuffed men and women suspected to be instigators or criminals and dragged them away.

"Oi! You two!" a gendarme shouted as they passed him.

"Yes?" Chen called.

"I've been told I needed to find you gents. Markus Flijcher and Joe Chen, right?" he asked, his thin brogue mangling the both delicate and rough pronunciation of Markus's surname.

"Yes…?" Chen said. Markus crossed his arms.

"Sirs, my name's Corporal MacLeod. ArkConstruction's requested your presence."

Chen narrowed his eyes and Markus shifted.

"Tell them it's a Sunday," Markus said, a tang of caution and confusion swirling through his words.

"It's not to do work, it's to get some. They've got a job for you."

Markus and Chen locked eyes, both confused. The Founders would probably have heard about the party, so they probably knew what would have happened to the both of them. _So why do they want us _now_?_ was the unspoken question hanging in the air between the two men.

Markus looked over at MacLeod, smiled, and nodded. "Alright. Take us to your leader, then."

MacLeod led them past a Security checkpoint in the harbor and onto a transport boat, which roared to life and accelerated out into the open water.

ArkConstruction's central offices were on Alpha Pelgo, in the rotunda at the base of Founders' Tower. It was the most Guest-trafficked area on said pelgo, to the point where a dedicated port had been opened in an extension to the ArkCon building to allow for the large influx of Guests proposing improvements to their pelgos. There were several Guests waiting in the port, Chen observed, as the boat shot into the Alpha Pelgo harbor. As the boat pulled even with the mooring, Chen could see that the line went on for quite a ways, onward into the building and to a desk, where a receptionist was accepting architectural drafts and bills of materials and filing them away.

Chen and Markus skipped the line.

The corporal stepped off the boat, motioned for the two Guest builders to follow, and led them out past the line into the lobby, then to an elevator behind the Reception & Filing desk. Chen and Markus filed into the lift, MacLeod scanned his I.D. card on the panel, and it started up, smoothly accelerating out of its bay and delivering them to the… second, third, fourth, _fifth _floor of the building with little more than a _whoosh_ing noise.

The gleaming white doors slid open and the three men stepped out of the elevator.

They were standing in a boardroom, decorated in austere white Arkoral shot through with ribbons of teeth-freezing icy blue and some sort of laminated soft wood. The long curving table in the center was made of the same, with two annuli of Arkoral and plastic on the outer edge and the wood in the center. White ambient lights lit the room and scattered off the Arkoral, lending the room a soft glow all its own. A panoramic window faced toward Founders' Tower; the building was on a parallel curve to the rotunda, very nearly perpendicular to the narrow split down the kilometer-high Tower. An interior designer might have called the room perfect.

Chen and Markus had no time to appreciate it.

"Apologies for bringing you down here so early after your party last night, but we've got something that needs doing, and you're the only ones who we know can do it," a heavily built man in a black suit enunciated, his voice rich and deep, scattered sound waves eaten by the Arkoral. It was like standing right next to him, though he was at the far head of the table about twenty meters down the length of the room.

"Have a seat," said Suit, gesturing to the seats. A benevolent tone entered his voice.

Chen and Markus looked at each other. Markus was the first one to sit, lowering himself carefully as though the chair were rigged to explode if he were to sit down too hard. Chen followed Markus, sitting across from him in the chair adjacent the head at their end of the table.

"You men are the best foremen on the Guest Pelgos. The best foremen on the Ark, perhaps. Would you mind… helping us with a project?" He paused for a response. When none came, he continued.

"A scientist of ours recently discovered a way to accelerate Arkoral's life cycle to a level three times beyond that of its current growth rate. We are testing this new technology by building a new residential and farming pelgo. We want you men to supervise the construction process."

Chen and Markus looked away from the man's face and locked eyes for a moment, then returned to the speaker.

"You will be required to execute these plans-" the man pressed a button and a hologram flickered into being between the two Guests, directly over the table, "-in the minimum possible time. Allowing for fabrication time, variances in labor skill, and minor errors in construction, the project should take about a week.

"Any questions from either of you?"

Markus raised his hand.

"Yes?" asked the man.

"Will you be selecting a construction crew for us?"

"No. That will be your job. Food and water rations will be tripled for anyone on your workforce."

Chen and Markus shared another glance, then nodded, and Chen raised his voice.

"We accept."

**-The Engineer-**

The ArkSec powerboat was screaming across the surface of the water as it sped Devin, Gretchen, and Parson away from the Security forces, both 750-kilowatt, 1500 newton-metre engines exchanging hydrogen fuel for force and applying it to the water with huge turbines.

"Do you even have a plan beyond the whole 'bust me out of prison and steal a boat' thing?" Gretchen shouted to Parson as he worked the controls, the wind noise and redlined engines deafening.

"No, not really!" he shouted back.

Devin was hunched in a corner, occasionally looking up and over the thick titanium landing shield to see if they were being pursued.

It wasn't long before the ArkSec forces mobilized and a small flotilla of boats pulled into the powerboat's wake. Devin began to snap off pistol shots at them. Remarkably, he was able to land a few shots on the boats, the speed at which they were travelling causing the bullets to strike the attacking police boats as they closed the gap between Parson's boat and the iron fist of the law. Unfortunately, at this speed, on a boat, there was simply no way to hit the oncoming gendarme boats with a pistol. Devin eventually just stopped shooting.

"It's time to start making a plan!" Gretchen shouted at Parson.

"I have made one! HOLD ON TO SOMETHING!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, radically shifting direction. They were now headed straight at a canal cut into the rusting sides of a Guest pelgo.

They entered the narrow artificial river at high speed, spraying water all throughout the containers adjoining the canal.

"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-" Devin and Parson roared as they careened down the narrowing strait. Gretchen just screamed. They were all cut off by the boat smashing into the side of a house in the Pelgo, disintegrating a dining table, throw rug, the bottom half of a refrigerator, and a small couch, and experiencing a near instantaneous onset of unconsciousness.

Parson awoke to the snapping, sputtering sound of gunfire and the body of a shotgun being stuck into his face.

"Can you use this shit?" a large, burly Asian man shouted into Parson's face, offering a hand and the aforementioned shotgun. He pronounced _shit_ as _sheet_.

"Sure," he said, wrapping his left hand around the barrel/pump assembly and taking the man's hand with his right. He was bodily yanked up and left standing in the middle of the devastated room, a shotgun in his hand.

"There's some ammunition in the freezer," the Asian said, rushing over to the doorframe of the container. "Shoot for the blue motherfuckers." Again, he mispronounced his English profanities; _motherfucker_ became _madafacka_. Parson chuckled inwardly and opened the fallen freezer, reaching behind a large box of frozen meals and finding about thirty-six extra shotgun shells. He slipped six into rings on the side of the stock and the rest into his cargos' zip-up pockets.

"You seen a little girl or a teenage boy around here?"

"Yeah. They took 'em to the hospital. The girl was roughed up. Madafackas looking for them."

The 'blue madafackas' arrived quickly; they were ArkSec troops, carrying submachine guns and wearing full body armor. The Asian man released the bolt on his M4A2 carbine, raised it, and began shooting at them as they passed.

"There's a hole in the ceiling cut up into a bridge! Take it, head across, and engage them from the other side!" the man with the assault rifle shouted over the deafening racket of gunfire exchanges. Parson nodded and scanned the ceiling. There was a square hole positioned over where the fridge had been before the powerboat smashed into the house and cut it in half. Parson leapt up, grabbed the edge of the hole, and hoisted himself up.

He was inside a series of welded-together containers about forty-five metres long. It wasn't a long run to the other side, where he found a loaded bolt-action sniper rifle, five extra magazines for it stored in a small backpack, and a wide, narrow window. Parson hefted the rifle, set the bipod on a narrow ledge welded in beneath the window, and slammed the bolt forward, locking it down in one smooth motion. He put his eye to the scope and tuned it to triple magnification. Then, he waited.

It wasn't long before an ArkSec officer rushed through his sights. Parson lined up his sights on the man's back, around where his sternum would have been, and pulled the trigger. The gun gave a sudden, heaving kick, the barrel rose about a hand's-width, and when he re-centered the gun, the man he had fired at was strewn across the ground, his legs draped over a concrete barrier at an impossible angle. Parson set his jaw and yanked the bolt back, emptying the chamber, springing a new round up from the magazine into the bolt, and charging the hammer.

It wasn't long before another one rushed into his sights, so he slammed the bolt forward, locked it down, and pulled the trigger. The gun jerked and the man dropped.

He continued to snipe at the Security forces for some time, until the assault rifle exchanges beneath him ceased.

"…the _hell_?" he whispered to the new silence. Gunfire still continued in the background, but the street was almost completely silent.

Parson's question was answered in rather short order when a gendarme wearing a gray baseball cap poked his head up through the hatch at the other end of the container skybridge. Without thinking, Parson raised, shouldered, charged, and fired the sniper at him. The unfortunate point man's head exploded as a 7.62x51mm round blasted through his forehead.

It was now shotgun time.

Parson swung the backpack on, secured the rifle over it, and grabbed his shotgun as a second man clambered up into the container. He snarled at Parson as he heaved up, up _up-_

The shotgun heaved in his hands as he depressed the trigger, emitting fire, sparks, supersonic pellets of lead, and a noise like an unbelievably loud and percussive throat-clearing. The man fell from the square aperture and made a thudding noise as he hit the ground.

They continued to flood up through the narrow entrance, raising submachine guns only for Parson to cut them down with more sprays of lethality from his shotgun. At one point a man made it up into the skybridge, but Parson simply stopped reloading, pumped the shotgun, and pumped his chest with death.

Eventually, the furious onslaught on the little chokepoint stopped; they had run out of people to kill Parson with. He confirmed this by swinging back down into the house.

The Asian man was dead. He was lying in a pool of his own blood, covered in the bodies of men in bulletproof armor whose lives he and Parson had ended. Parson took his carbine, threw it over his back and strapped it on, then took his leave.

The street was muddy with iron oxide and blood; it caked to Parson's trainers and turned his pants' legs red-orange as he ran towards the sound of gunfire. There were, intermittently, bodies strewn across the winding street; some were in a state of half-slide into the parallel canal, having been shot from narrow crenellations in the windows across the street, and Parson could see the shooters scanning the street with automatic rifles and snipers. They were, thankfully, not targeting him. The Security forces were easy to distinguish from the Guests by their dress, being blue, generally tidier, and better equipped.

It was maybe half a kilometre before he came upon a Guest-operated gate at a narrow choke-point in the street; Guests were firing down into a force of Security officers armed with high-explosive charges as they frantically tried to apply them to the gate and blow it open. An adjoining street flooded more gendarmes onto the apron in front of the gate.

"Shit," Parson whispered. He began to back away from the overwhelming melee ahead; there had to be a way up into the gate!

Suddenly a thin gendarme carrying recon gear and a pistol came tearing across his field of view; he was racing for a sealed storehouse doorway in the street. Parson swung around behind a wall and peeked out to watch the man. He applied a series of electronic devices to the door, plugged them together, and began operating a program on some sort of tablet computer. Eventually, the door unlocked and he ran in. Parson followed him into the storehouse and out into some alleys along another canal, covered high above the street by layers of tarps and corrugated steel.

The agent kept running through a series of dark, narrow doorways and passages, pistol at low ready. Parson followed as quickly as he could until suddenly the man disappeared.

And suddenly around the corner he came, pistol raised, snarling like a wolf.

"FUCK!" Parson shouted and he pumped the shotgun and pulled the trigger and the gendarme's head turned into a mass of splintered bone and vaporized brain tissue, some of which splattered against and stained Parson's shirt deeply. The corpse toppled to the ground bonelessly, and Parson gingerly stepped over it.

He continued through the darkened passages between the houses, carefully checking his corners with his shotgun before entering the next alleyway, once again following the sound of gunfire. It wasn't long before he reached his destination; the alleys adjoined the gatehouse. He watched Guests rapidly organizing behind the gate, raising weapons, reloading, setting up automated defenses.

A Guest slowed from a run to a stop in front of Parson. "Who're you?" he asked.

"Err… Gregory Parson?" Parson shrugged. "What's it to you?"

"You ArkSec? You don't look it…"

"Hell no."

"Good. You willing to help us out? The ArkSec bastards are coming after the two escapees from the Orphanage; damned if we're gonna let them get the kids. You're packing some serious heat. Got anything else up your sleeve? Hacking? Engineering?"

"Yeah. I'm a mechanical engineer. Or, well, I was before I came here."

"High-tail it back there." The Guest gestured back behind the front lines. "They're setting up a last line of defense before they reach the Rue d'Hospital. That's where the kids are staying. They get to the Rue and it's a clear shot to the hospital and they'll be taking the kids to prison for dissent if we don't stop them there."

"Aren't you guys holding them at the gate?"

"For now."

"Well, then, let's stop the blue bastards."

"That's the spirit."

Parson shouldered the M4 he had taken from the dead man down the road and released the bolt. "I get the feeling it's gonna be a long day."

"Oh, trust me, it is. Now that things have come to a head they're never gonna go back down."

**-The Scientist-**

"You fucking bastard!" Amelie shouted, slapping Fred across the face. "You think you can just leave? Ask me out and then take me to bed and then fucking _leave_?" Her face was burning with anger; her body was rigid, muscles in her neck standing out like steel cables and fists tensed into balls; her mind was on fire with rage and betrayal.

"Amelie, it's not that!" Fred fired back, standing in his shirt and Amelie's living room. "Hell, if I'd have known you were going to wake up I would never have even tried! It was a long shot!"

"What was a long shot?" Amelie shouted. "That you'd get laid? Cause it worked out fine in the end!"

"The whole plan I concocted! I need… Goddamn it, I need to do something that only you could do!"

"Then why didn't you ask me _before_ we had sex?"

"BECAUSE I DIDN'T HAVE TIME!" Fred roared. "You have no idea what the hell I am trying to accomplish!"

"WELL, WHAT _ARE _YOU TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH?"

"SAVING THE ARK!"

The room fell silent and Amelie stared at Fred. "Wow. I'm so impressed. I got used by an altruist, how sweet," she finally said.

"Like I said, you have no idea what I'm trying to do." Fred reached for his jeans, but Amelie beat him to them, grabbing them and holding them out of the window over the water.

"You want to actually go out like nothing happened, you're gonna give me an explanation. Now."

Fred took in a deep breath and exhaled in an explosive sigh. "Alright. Alright, sure.

"You remember the Flood, right?"

"…yeah? What's that got to do with this?"

"I used to work as a molecular biologist and genetic engineer in Washington before it. I had been working on a plant called risea. It was supposed to be capable of growth in salt water. I have the full genetic code of the plant on a CD. I needed to sequence a seed."

"Then why didn't you just _ask_? I could have done it for you! It would have been perfectly fine!"

"Well, why won't you now?"

"I never said I wouldn't! And _you _never answered my question!" Amelie cried.

"Because I thought it wouldn't work!"

The room fell into a deathly silence. Amelie stared at Fred. Fred stared at Amelie. They stared at each other some more.

Then Amelie grabbed him by the wrist, pulled him into her bedroom, and slammed the door behind the two.

**A/N**: I'm ba-aaaack! Two chapters posted. The story's at about half to 66% done right now.

fred and amelie, sittin' in amelie's bed...


	11. Fianchetto

**The Radical**

"The framework is done, Foreman Chen!" shouted a young man in a welding mask, waving for an inspection. His fellow welders flicked off their plasma torches and set down their solder.

"Good," Chen said, puffing lightly on his cigar and hopping down to inspect the welding on the steel bars. Despite the rust-resistant ArkConstruction steel alloy, they had to get the frame done soon and done well, or the sea air might start to eat away at the galvanized layer like a cavity under a teenager's braces. And even if they were fast, if the frame snapped in the wrong place, not even Arkoral would be able to hold it together. People could die.

It was a fact Chen was well acquainted with.

He peered up at the welding through his spectacles, the Construction tug rocking gently beneath them, another load of rebar on a floating pallet behind it.

"I don't have time to check all these, you know," Chen said, turning to the man.

"Well, I don't know about _them_," he said, motioning to the older men behind him, "but I'm alright at this stuff. So you should probably go talk to them about theirs."

"You wouldn't happen to be lying to me, would you?" Chen asked, layering some honey into his voice. "Because if you were, are, and ever do, and I find out, you'll be seed carbon for the first Arkoral pour."

The man blinked twice at Chen, then scowled, flipped the mask down, and raised his solder. "'scuse me," he mumbled as he raised the torch and weld steel. "There's a few welds I might've neglected."

"That's what I thought. Go finish the job." Chen's sentence was punctuated by the angry buzzing _woosh_ of a plasma cutter bursting into life, the magnetic coils shaping the ionized, superheated gas into a controllable jet. The older men got their work done much slower than the young Turk, but to a much higher standard. Chen nodded at each of their welds, waved them off, and, once the boy is done fixing his neglectful work, they moved on to the next phase; preparing the Arkoral mold.  
>Chen directed the hammering-together of the flexible plastic molding material as they built the giant torus on which the pelgo will be founded, plumbed, and supplied with amenities with an eagle's eye. His experience was a major boon to his construction crew; they all did or would make small errors which could add days to the construction time, and time was money for this crew. Chen could spot minute cracks even before they exist by how the sheets are aligned and bent. As quickly and problem-free as two thousand linear metres of tubing can be assembled, the toroid's inner frame was built, and they began to assemble the outer frame, bending new rebar, welding, sealing holes in the inner frame and preparing for the first pour. Almost as quickly, they were done with the outer frame as well, and were ready to fill the mold.<br>Several men and women in high-visibility jackets and trioxidane filter masks guided the spouts into place off of the materials delivery tugs and signal for the pour to begin to the operators, who activated the machines and release litre after litre of Arkoral, interspersed with the carbon-boys' addition of carbon-rich liquid into the mix. Due to the mold covering nearly the entire structure, the toroid couldn't be exposed while it hardens up, so it can't pull carbon from the atmosphere to build the coral skeleton and replicate its DNA. Instead, they (and ArkCon) use a solution sourced from seawater and pure carbon extracted from the atmosphere, Ark's industries, and cremations to ensure plentiful carbon supply and even distribution.

The pour completed, the construction rafts withdrew and the torus was sealed off. They had to get started on the internal lattice of steel that would hold the structures of the pelgo up and allow them to work and connect buildings into the amenities torus rather than simply build them all on the torus. In this case, the circle having the largest area for the same circumference is playing against them, as the lattice must be very large and so some buildings will have to be connected over a great distance.

But then, the plans Chen was given _did_ say it _is_ primarily an agricultural pelgo.

_Probably more rice,_ Chen thought as he reviewed the architectural plan. That's what the growing areas look like-

-and suddenly, the tablet froze, refreshed, and displayed an entirely new irrigation system with... pumps? Seawater? _What in hell?_ Thankfully, the plans weren't altered enough for there to be a major change required. He spun them idly, observing at each angle, not noticing until a few minutes later that there had been another change.

A change he would have to implement personally.

"Markus?" Chen called on the site's work frequency.

"_Shoot_," said the Dutchman.

"I need to go requisition some new materials. The plans have been updated. No big deal, but they're calling for some modifications to the plumbing and we don't have the materials for that. Can you take the fore for now?"

"_What're friends for?"_

"Thank you," Chen said, keying his com unit off and stepping out of the construction site.

_I hope Security doesn't have a problem parting with their high-explosive charges..._

**The Guest**

"Here's your seeds," Amelie said, handing Fred an acrylic canister full of small pods. "Genetic variation included. No incest. Dominant and recessive alleles fully distributed. Enjoy."

"Thank you," Fred breathed in relief, taking the canister. It was warm and covered in some sort of oily steam from the biosequencer.

It had gone down like this:

Fred and Amelie had gotten it on one more time and then taken a trip to ArkLabs. Fred was passed off as her boyfriend (which was sort of true) and taken inside. They took an elevator down a few dozen metres and then they were in the sequencer room.

"Too easy," Fred had said.

"Isn't it? I wonder why the Guests don't sneak in or something."

Fred had booted his laptop and after a good deal of noodling with USB ports and transceivers, the couple had pieced together a connection between the outdated device and the high-tech biosequencer.

"Ready?" Amelie asked, as Fred pulled the CD out of its soft cotton case.

"Ready," Fred said, pressing it into the optical drive and sliding it shut. After a bit of clicking and dragging, the biosequencer started up, and thirty minutes later Fred was standing in the center of the room holding a canister full of a lifeform that, until now, had never existed.

It was an... _intoxicating_ feeling. The power of God the Creator in the hands of Man. He could create an army of dinosaur ninja test-tube babies and change the world.

_But... a time and place for everything. Later. When the seas recede and the world is ready to receive its rightful king._ Fred chuckled as Amelie began the lengthy process of disconnecting the laptop. She handed him the compact disk and he lifted it delicately off of her slender typist's fingers, marvelling at the gleaming finish and how the optical layering caught the light.

"That was the easy part. Now we need to get out."

"Why don't we take the elevator?"

"No... that's not gonna work." Amelie was pacing around the biosequencer, rubbing her fingers together and twisting them, thumb against pointer in a rectangle.

"Why not?"

"Because that cylinder has a tracker in it; the second it passes those doors, Security will string us up by our entrails."

"So... why don't we take it out through a different door?"

Amelie paused and stared at Fred, her mouth agape. "That..."

"What?"

"When we get home you are so getting laid. That is one of the most brilliant plans I have ever heard."

"And that is one of the most difficult-to-interpret sentences I've ever heard. Sarcasm?" She shook her head. "So you're serious. What's another door, then?"

"Follow me," she said, swiping her card on a nearby door and leading him through what appeared to be a lounge until-

"This maintenance bay has hydroscooters. We jack one of those and we can make it out of here."

"One? I need to get back to the Guest pelgoes. This is for them, not the Founders."

"Well... then I'm coming with you."

"Amelie, no. You're a Founder. You've got a good life. I don't have a place for you to stay, and-" Fred's argument was silenced by a large flap of latex impacting his face.

"Shut up and suit up. You're taking me home, rusty."

Fred peeled the latex from his face to see Amelie stripping down and shaking the fabric out. _Time and place, mister,_ he told himself, and began to do the same.

It was surprisingly easy to get into the suit, and its one-size, tension-pressure construction meant that apart from selecting a suitable helmet mounting ring and container pack for his oxygen and the seeds, it fit perfectly. Amelie walked over to the larger cargo airlock and slid it open, then hefted one of the scooters and tossed it in.

"Okay. Helmets on. I'll connect your oxygen line for you, you do the same for me." Fred handed her the bright yellow bottle and she secured it tightly to the diving frame's O2 mount. The feed line was folded flat against the helmet, and she slid that into place, listening for the loud _click_ that would tell the applicator that, without a doubt, this man was ready to scuba.

"You're good," she said. Her voice was muffled by the helmets, so she tapped his faceplate and pinched her thumb and forefinger together. _Good_. He responded in kind, and she handed him her oxygen bottle. Securing it in a similar fashion, he gave her the _good_ sign and then turned.

Suddenly she grabbed him and butted their helmets together.

_What?_ he asked, shrugging his shoulders defensively.

"_Check check?_" came her digitized voice in his helmet. _"Okay, the network is showing green. Sorry. These helmets have a long-range radio system, and that's how you sync it."_ Fred nodded and watched as a tiny green HUD came online, displaying current pressure in pascals, oxygen remaining and flowing in litres and cubic centimetres a second, suit pressure and integrity. He held up another _good_ sign and Amelie nodded. She sauntered over to the cargo 'lock and stepped in. Fred followed her in and she punched the _CYCLE_ button.

Almost immediately Fred felt an enormous current of water force him into the ceiling, swirl, and hurl him out into the ocean. The suit's HUD flickered once and then redefined all the parameters, starting his oxygen flow and showing a bar of 980kPa.

"_Hey. Turn around. I've got the scooter._"

Fred turned and looked down. Amelie was kicking upwards, carrying the inactive scooter.

"_It has a built-in map, so we can take it out to your pelgo. Which one is it?_"

"Five," Fred said, grabbing onto a handrail on the exterior of the streamlined, almost sharklike shape of the scooter. "Do you mind if I drive?"

"_Not at all._" Amelie relinquished the device and Fred swung into the driver's position. He was familiar with electric hydroscooters from diving trips back before the Flood, but the Ark design was pretty new. Amelie had gotten the map running on a waterproof screen in front of him, and it was currently centered on Guest Pelgo 5. He nodded and began inspecting it for the 'on' switch. After a bit of looking, he found it on the scooter's screen; it was touch. He reached out and tapped it and felt an electric motor whir into life inside the frame of the device. Amelie grabbed onto the machine and Fred gunned it.

They travelled underwater, not risking being seen from the surface. It was a pretty long trip, to be honest. All those little kilometres added up in the end to a relatively long distance, especially when your trip is in a giant blue expanse punctuated by Ark-dwelling fish. Eventually, though, they reached GP5 Harbor, and Fred began the ascent. The pascals and metres fell from their shoulders like the water they were parting, and eventually they broke the surface in the bay, rust-saturated water swirling around them, as well as a good number of surprised Guests.

Fred was the first to climb out of the water, dragging the scooter with him. It was surprisingly light. _Must be carbon-fibre, or something like that._ He set the scooter against a nearby container and unsecured his helmet and oxygen line.

"Can somebody take me and Amelie," he started, gesturing to the woman extricating herself from the bay and removing her helmet, "to Isadora?"

**The Engineer**

The Security forces wouldn't stop their onslaught. Medics would drag the wounded back to triage and off of the battlefield while platoons swarmed through the rusting makeshift gates one by one, only to run into the Guests guarding the next one. Helicopters hovered above, raining death on any Guest militia that was foolish enough to leave cover.

"Ammo!" Parson shouted. His Barnett was empty, and he had burned through the last of his 7.62 rounds in a hurry, putting round after round into the crowd of Security gendarmes advancing on the gate.

A Guest soldier crawled over to him and set a pack of ten fresh magazines down next to Parson. He nodded his thanks and jammed one in to the gun, a round rising into the chamber to clear the way for the bolt, which he slammed forward, already aiming.

_Boom_, said the sniper, and a Security officer's chest exploded.

_Boom, _said the sniper, and another one dropped.

_Boom_, said the sniper, and this shot was a miss. The officer Parson had aimed at had dropped behind cover, and no sooner did Parson chamber a new round before the gendarme raised his rifle and began to spray down the top of the gate in the area surrounding Parson. A few rounds hit his vest, and one cut a gash through his pants' leg, but he was otherwise unscathed.

_Boom_, said the sniper, and the man who shot Parson wasn't so lucky.

_Boom,_ the gate answered, as a Security charge sent it tumbling off of its hinges.

"Shit!" yelled a Guest minuteman as the Security forces began to pour through the gate and engulf the Guests in a vicious crossfire. Parson dropped low, slammed another magazine into his rifle, and stuffed the rest into his backpack. Once the ammo was tucked away, he threw the sniper over his shoulder, safety on, and grabbed an assault rifle from a fallen minuteman, firing as he ran off of the gate and into the residential container stacks. He was able to watch through a window slit as the Security forces headed for the next gate, and he set up his rifle in a larger window in the adjoining container, aiming to strike at the back of the Security forces.

_Chamber the round, line up the shot, take a breath, hold it, exhale, pull as you-_

_spin because that sound was not good-_

There was a Security officer with a knife out and his eyes narrowed advancing towards Parson, and it didn't take him long to realize that his victim wasn't crippled by tunnel vision anymore. Parson lunged at him and covered the man's body with his own, struggling to pin the knife and disarm the officer. The two men rolled across the floor, roaring in each other's faces and panting as they fought, tooth and nail, to turn the weapon against the other, until the Security man found his head colliding with a wall and a knife sliding in between his vertebrae.

Parson took up his shooting position again only to find that the police forces had broken through the last gate.

_One obstacle left, _he thought, setting his jaw grimly against the sea of death he saw beneath himself.

The main gate onto the Rue was a formidable obstacle. Guest turrets composed of little more than image recognition computers attached to tripods and assault rifles swept across the 'dirt' in front of the defenders, while a crew of Guests prepared to catch the Security forces in a crossfire. The helicopters were busy shredding the bridges that the Guests were using to position themselves to defend the courtyard.

"Here's hoping," Parson muttered as he picked up the sniper and left the bleeding dead gendarme in the container.

**The Scientist**

"You guys haven't done too badly by yourselves here, you know that?" Amelie commented as Fred and Isadora planted the seeds. "Your agricultural system is great and it's surprising you've got electricity."

"Can you please stop talking about how impressed you are?" Isadora asked, her voice dripping venom.

"Sure," Amelie said, happy to comply. "I didn't mean to offend."

"Well, you kinda did."

"Isa..." Fred said, leaving his plea open-ended.

"What? Ain't my fault I don't like your girlfriend. She's too stuck-up for-"

"Ex-_cuse_ me?" Amelie sassed, hands on hips and eyes bulging in surprise that _this chick wants to go?_

"Hey, whoa, you two," Fred said, steeling his voice against the brewing fight. "I don't care if you two don't get along. This is about Ark. Now, we've planted the seeds. It's time to wait."

"How long is the germination time?"

"Dunno. That's the plant's choice, I guess."

"You've got to be kidding me," Isadora muttered.

"No, I'm not," Fred said. "I'm gonna go get some water and test it on them. Be right back."

The room was silent for a little while before Isa spoke. "So. How'd you guys meet, anyway?"

"We ran into each other at market. Literally."

"Oh, you Founders have a market, huh?"

"Yeah. You don't seem too angry with Fred for going, though." It may have been hallucination, but Amelie could have sworn she heard Isadora unsheathing... something. _A knife?_

"I'm not. He deserves it. You, on the other hand..."

"Who's to say?"

"You're a Founder. None of them have ever done anything to deserve their station or their wealth."

"You're pretty opinionated," Amelie said, picking up the nearest metal object she could find: a rectangular square metre of corrugated Ark steel, and lifted it from its position leaning against the wall, muffling it against her hip.

"Don't I got a right to be?"

"Hey, I'm no politician. Just a scientist," Amelie said, raising the steel with her arms in a shrugging reflex.

"There's where you're wrong," Isadora said, turning and lunging and stabbing with the knife. It dented into the steel and the thin material, despite its reinforcing corrugation running perpendicular to the force, folded around the forceful attack made by the farm-girl, trapping her knife hand. She snarled in anger and tackled Amelie. "Nobody's just anything on Ark. You're either a Founder or a Guest, and damn you if you're neither. So get the fuck off of the-"

And the door burst inward, along with Fred, four litres of seawater, and four gendarmes in full tactical gear.

"...fence."

"GET THE HELL DOWN, NOW! HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE 'EM!" shouted the lead man, pointing his submachine gun at the women tangled together on the floor. Amelie and Isadora complied.

"What is this shit?" the officer asked, waving at the egg-carton planters where they had seeded the risea.

"Don't touch it," Fred coughed. He had taken a big hit from the officers to incapacitate him, and it showed. He was clutching at his stomach and wincing hard with every breath or movement. "It's an experiment."

"Hell no. Experiments happen under our watch. Two!"

"Sir?" asked a bulky, tall man as he snapped to attention.

"Collect these, secure them, and take them down for processing." Two nodded and closed the cases, then went back outside.

"No! They're sensitive! They're seeds! Plant seeds!" Fred cried.

"And?"

"They're for the Guests!"

"I'd love to believe they deserve it," the captain sighed.

"They do!"

"No. Have you looked at GP7 lately? Do it and get back to me."

Two returned and sealed the seeds' containers in memory foam, then locked the prisms into shock-resistant cases and hefted them. "Samples secured, Captain."

"Let's go. Lock these people up, we're taking them too."

Fred's ribs were checked and it was ascertained that he needed help to set it, so they bandaged it as best they could on site, then handcuffed him and everyone else and marched them out of the carrier's tower and out onto the former airstrip. A helicopter was hovering high above the ship, fast-ropes touching the deck. Its downdraft bowed the tops of berry shrubs growing in the artificial soil covering the strip.

"Captain to Strike Two-Seven, approaching hop point. One injured, two okay. Take 'em up."

"Roger."

Amelie could look up from where she was standing to see a member of the strike team hook a winch onto the missile rack running under the strongly-swept wings, slide it out over the edge, and secure a man-sized basket to it. He then proceeded to lower the basket until the strike team could get Fred into it and then raised it up. They took Isadora up next, and finally, Amelie got to ride up into the helicopter's troop bay. She was forced to sit at gunpoint by one of the men in the bay, and from her window seat she could look out and see the strike team that had accosted them tying and carabining into the fast-ropes as they lifted off.

The man guarding her leaned over and poked her with his gun. "Hey. Check it out, Guest. There's why the Cap says you guys don't deserve squat."

It was Guest Pelgo 7; the hospital pelgo.

It was burning.

**A/N: **Just so you guys don't get confused about the timing here, Chen's plans are updated immediately after the seeds are turned in.

Reviews are lovely.


	12. Open Shell

**-The Daughter-**

It had been a while since she had been awake.

Gretchen moaned in pain as a knife of agony shot through her, from her core to the base of her spine in a circle bounding her middle.

"She's awake!" she was dimly aware of hearing as she struggled to shift back into an upright position on the folded cot forming a pillow behind her.

"Hey, girl," said a comforting voice in her ear. "Easy. Just lie down for a second and breathe, alright? You shouldn't be doing that."

She opened her eyes and was blinded for a few seconds before blinking through the fluorescent white and resolving images through the acid wash of light against her quivering pupils. The voice was coming from a man in a long white labcoat and a surgical mask. He was fiddling with a dispenser from the IV at Gretchen's bedside, and as he turned a tiny worm gear attached to it, Gretchen felt the residual pain from her earlier movement subside.

"Synphene. A powerful painkiller. You should be alright to move a little under this dosage," the man said.

"Are you a doctor?" Gretchen asked, her voice coarse and disused.

"No. I'm a healer. There's a difference."

"Do you have any water?"

"Yes. Here," he said, picking up a bottle and decanting a few decilitres out.

"Thank you," Gretchen croaked as she took the cup and drank. It was powerfully sweet, and Gretchen almost couldn't force the liquid down.

"You need to drink it," the doctor said, seeing her distaste. "It'll restore your energy faster than anything else."

She forced the rest down and made a point to ask for regular water from there on out.

"Can I ask you a few questions?" the doctor said, picking up a clipboard from the table in the tiny room.

"Go ahead," Gretchen said, her throat aching less as the 'water' smoothed it and rehydrated her cells.

"Do you remember what happened before you wound up here?"

"I was on a boat with Devin and Parson before we crashed."

"Okay. Is that it?"

"Yes."

"When's your birthday?"

"September seventh."

"Age?"

"Eleven."

"What's the date?"

"No idea. I haven't seen a calendar since I got here."

"Alright. Last question. What did I say the painkiller you are on is called?"

"Uh... synphene."

"Good. I can say that you don't appear to display any signs of mental illness, induced or otherwise. Let me check your dilation and reflexes."

He shined a light in her eyes and looked at her pupils, then tapped her knees with a hammer a few times until her legs reflexively jerked.

"Alright, you're in fine physical condition. Please notify somebody if you decide to suddenly leave your bed," he said, smiling. "We've had a number of scares with people leaving their beds to try to return to their posts. Course, when your post no longer exists, it's hard to do."

"What?"

"Why don't you take a look outside?" The doctor gestured to the window and Gretchen followed his hand.

Outside was nothing but clear green tropical waters and the occasional blurry Arkoral foundation.

"We're in a submarine!?" Gretchen asked, excited.

"Yes." The man stood from his little stool at her bedside and prepared to leave. As he slid the partition's curtain aside, he pulled back, turned, and called to Gretchen once more. "You've got a visitor!"

It was Parson.

**-The Engineer-**

Gretchen smiled up at Parson as he walked into the tiny curtained partition, his height and the bulk of his combat gear combining to increase his presence in the tiny room to an astounding level.

He looked over at her and smiled. "Hey," he said, voice cracking after a few minutes of letting his mouth work and his brain sort out what he wanted to say.

She got up and hugged him.

"I'm sorry," he whispered into her hair as he crouched down to her level. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine."

"No, no, it's not. I dragged you into this. We thought we were going to save you but we weren't. Instead we brought you here and it's even worse now than it was before."

"No, it's fine. We're all gonna be okay now. We can get away. We've got a new ship..."

Parson barely choked down a sob. "Yeah." He stood and smiled. "Yeah, we do." He reached down and ruffled her hair affectionately before turning and pushing aside the partition curtain.

Everything was shit.

Gretchen was quite possibly the only person in a partition who wasn't a casualty of the disastrous defense of Guest Pelgo 7. Not only that, she was the _reason_ for the attack and it was quite possible that he was the only one who knew that all those Guests had sacrificed bodies, lives, and lead for a girl and a teenage boy.

It took all of Parson's resolve to turn away from rationalizing the situation, appraising the impossible forces arrayed before them, and to turn towards the next hill.

Which happened to be a staircase on the opposite side of the sub's passenger compartment. Twenty steps, four metres, a psychological leap closer to returning to duty.

He made the leap and found himself in the sub's kitchen-cum-triage room. Moans and gasps of pain were echoing out from behind the counter and down the airlock hall as wounded volunteer after wounded volunteer were brought in and laid on beds, waiting for a doctor to splint an injury or send them down a floor for more intensive treatment.

Parson sighed and sat down against a wall, resting his arms on his rifle and hanging his head. It wasn't shaping up to be the best day.

It got worse five seconds after that, when the ship exploded.

Well, it didn't _explode_, it just sort of shook, rolled a good thirty degrees to starboard, and then echoed down the line with ripping, shuddering sounds.

"Oh, shit," Parson whispered, rising shakily and slowly against the rolling ship when he suddenly found himself hurled against a wall by another impact.

He was on his feet by instinct and found his mind catching up with his body as he ran down a narrow hall to the bridge. It was an odd sensation and situation to experience, being attacked by invisible antagonists with no way to defend one's self. A sort of animal terror seized Parson's lizard brain while his intellect raced to find a viable defense for the battered submarine.

After half a minute or so, Parson reached the bridge, unsealed the door, and burst into a room flooding with water.

"Fuck." As he scanned the room, he found a half-dozen bodies at shorted terminals and two dying submariners, shrapnel embedded into their bodies and blood and salt water mixing into their bodies through their wounds.

He turned and slammed the door shut, then tore back down the twisting hallway. Unfortunately, there was a midshipman running in the opposite direction, and they collided soundly.

"Where's the lockout gear?"

"By the airlock, back down the hall, first door on the left." the breathless midshipman gasped.

"Thanks. Bridge is out. Everyone's dead or dying. Took a hit."

"Alright," the midshipman said, slumping against the wall.

Parson stood, turned, and continued his journey. The airlock wasn't far, and it was a simple matter to pull on a helmet, seal it, grab a scooter and lock out. Part of his mind screamed at Parson's stupidity, that _you just locked out into unknown water! You could have been crushed, or caught the bends!_

But he wasn't in deep. So he'd be fine. And there were more important things to take care of.

Like the attack submarines firing torpedoes at the Guest sub.

**-The Guest-**

It was a move that could only have been described as _decisive._

As the helicopter pulled out from Guest Pelgo 5 and over the water, Fred selected the man hanging from the handrail on the edge of the troop bay as a target, looked over at Amelie, sighed, looked back at the man, and lunged out of his seat at the guard, tackling low and reaching for his carabineer up above on the rail. As adrenaline pumped his world down to a speed where he heard the chatter of the guards' automatics going off at him as a one-by-one pop, his thumb pushed in the carabineer's clip and his wrist snapped it off the rail.

He and the gendarme tumbled out of the copter and down towards the welcoming waves below, past the fast-roped strike team and past the water's surface. Fred arrested their fall and pushed to the surface.

Now he had to finish this.

The gendarme kicked Fred away and frantically groped for his knife as Fred sloshed back through the water. He got a hold on it and made a jackknife move at Fred, knife arm straight.

He miscalculated.

His attack vector and form were good, but he was in full body armor while Fred was in a drysuit. Fred easily dodged away, grabbed the officer's wrist, and stole the knife.

"Fuck!" the officer shouted through the helmet. Fred kicked the officer away and began to swim away in the opposite direction.

"Moron," he muttered to himself as he escaped, the officer's service pistol at his side through just a bit of sleight-of-hand when he had stolen the knife.

It wasn't a long swim back to Guest Pelgo 5. They had barely made it a kilometre out from the artificial island, and Fred was a powerful swimmer. He pulled out of the water and looked up for the helicopter.

It had followed him.

It was closing fast, eight strike team members fast-roping down even as it moved, and then it airbraked and slung them forward. At the precise moment where they reached forty-five degrees, they let go of the ropes and sailed through the air, completing a graceful parabola, and rolled forward across the ground upon impact. Fred was already in the wind, though, and as he swung up onto a steel crossbar overlooking the street below, the last of the Sun receded beyond the horizon, and the pale lights of the Guest Pelgoes flickered on, candles and incandescents and chemical glows burning into the night and casting the dust in an eerie glow. They had no idea they were the ones being stalked now.

Advantage: Fred.

"Spread out! Find him!" said the strike team's leader, and the team complied, pairing off and moving out. They were in twos, a situation that Fred had commonly taught about during the stealth phase of his Practical Movement course. _The secret_, Fred had said,_ was to wait for one of them to make a blunder and take him out without the other one noticing, then finish him, too._

The strike team seemed to know this as well, unfortunately. They were not in the business of blundering. Their movements were quick and efficient, their sweeps of rooms were smooth, and they missed nothing as they progressed through the area. He had to stop them before things got out of hand and more Guests got involved.

_There_ said his subconscious, and he dropped down on top of one of them, reaching down to stifle a cry of surprise even as he threw his weight forward and down to crumple the man with as little sound as possible. He dropped and Fred slipped the point of the knife between his vertebrae, leaving it in as he lunged, hands reaching for the neck of the second man. His choke prevented a cry for help, and as he pinned the struggling man into the ground, he reached for the back of the fool's head and twisted sharply about a hundred-thirty-five degrees to the left and forty-five up, snapping the hapless specialist gendarme's neck. Fred reclaimed the knife from the now-dead man's neck and found a new hiding place as the remaining three teams intensified their search.

**-The Radical-**

Chen's boat was a quick one, and the process of obtaining the high-explosive charges had been easier than he had thought. They were being brought up now, as the boat lined up with the docking guiderails, and soon Chen would be able to place them.

Chen reviewed the plans on his foreman's tablet, spinning the wireframe architectural schematic idly as he fixed the location of the charges in his mind.

_"So that's it? You're just giving me the most powerful man-portable explosives on the Ark? No questions asked?" _he had asked the Security officer holding the case when he arrived at Security Tower.

_"Yep. Here you go. Please sign here, Mister Chen."_ Chen had scrawled his signature onto the touch-screen claim kiosk, and a little window containing the order form popped up on the screen. His signature was overlaid onto it and two Security officers took the case onto the boat headed back to the new pelgo.

_Oh!_ That was right. They had told him what the new pelgo's ID number was. Fourteen. Pelgo 14. While it was technically in Founder waters, it was being considered a Guest pelgo. They hadn't told him what it was for yet, but he was confident that eventually he'd find out.

He debarked and started out towards the construction site, walking the winding path along the floating bridges to the support tugs. "Markus," he said, keying his intercom, "how's it coming?"

"_Great," _Markus said. _"The Arkoral set much faster than we expected. We've finished adding auxiliary flotation into the tubes and we're just about to lay it into the water."_

"Really?" Chen asked, incredulous. Normally it took a few working days to set up an Arkoral structure on the scale of the new pelgo, but if they put on some running lights, they could have the new pelgo and all the structures ashore it ready by next morning at sunup. Chen cracked a grin at this new development.

"Foreman Chen!" one of the men handling the explosives called. "Where do you want these?" He gestured to the bright red plastic box.

"Down in the amenities ring," Chen said, waving to one of the ladders down into the toroid and a small hand-operated crane overlooking it. The two explosives men nodded and hooked the box into the crane, lowering it slowly down as one of the men slid down the ladder into the hollow ring's innards.

The application was swift; the explosives simply required a ten-centimetre hole to be drilled into the Arkoral, and then they could be attached and primed. After the delivery of the explosives, Chen handled it himself. Then, as per the plans, Chen hooked them up to a wireless receiver and keyed it into ArkSec frequency 449. _Done._

When he returned to the surface of the new pelgo, the crew was laying in farming and housing partitions on the inside of the torus and a few hanging over the edge. Chen pulled out the ladder and shut the access hatch as the floodlights came on over the construction project and the sun receded to rise again in twelve-odd hours. "Done."

**-The Scientist-**

Amelie watched Fred tumble out of the helicopter, grappling a gendarme, with great surprise.

"_Fuck_!" shouted one of the guards. He slid the cockpit access hatch open and turned. "You two! Stay here until I get back!" He slammed the door shut and then a few seconds later the other two on deck swung out onto cables that unfurled from under the wings to fast-rope down. That left one guard immediately next to the door. Amelie nodded towards him slightly, looking at Isadora meaningfully, and Isadora nodded back.

They rushed him together, Isa going for his helmet while Amelie threw an elbow at his face. Blood spurted from his nose and his head snapped back against the titanium bay bulkhead, making an audible _clang_ and knocking him out almost instantly. As they did so, the helicopter suddenly jerked back, knocking the women against the tail bulkhead.

"Shit!" Isadora gasped, as Amelie lifted the unconscious gendarme and raised his rifle. The door opened and the man who had entered earlier sprayed his unconscious teammate with a quick burst of submachine gun ammunition while Amelie struggled to brace the rifle, and then she fired, and the guard opening the door jerked back, dropping to the floor and clutching at his belly. She re-aimed and fired again for good measure, and then Isadora rushed into the cockpit, grabbed the pilot, and threw him out of the helicopter and into the thirsty ocean below.

After stripping the two armed men of all their gear and tumbling them into the sea as they had the first, Amelie and Isadora sat down in the pilot and copilot's chairs. The console was simple enough; their altitude was given in metres and their attitude in radians on three axes. There was a control stick and a trackball, which Amelie assumed was for quick angular adjustments, a fact she confirmed by pushing it forward and feeling the helicopter tilt forward on a one-to-one basis for every inch of arc she moved the little ball. She smiled and slowly pushed the control stick forward, watching a velocity dial spin up to ten, twenty, thirty kilometres an hour and climbing. Isadora, meanwhile, had a weapons console. The helicopter's gliding wings had mounted a few missiles and guns on underside rails. There were even air-to-water torpedoes.

"How's it feel to have air power?" Amelie asked.

"It's… nice," Isadora replied, and her voice made chills run down Amelie's spine. "Let's go blow up some ArkSec."

"_Mayday, mayday! This is Guest Medical Submarine Alpha to anybody listening! We're under attack by Security attack subs! We are carrying injured and sick and our hull integrity is below sixty percent!"_ called a scratchy voice over the open-channel radio.

"Speaking of which…" Isadora said, flashing a predatory grin. Amelie set her jaw under the stolen pilot's helmet and jammed the throttle open, watching the helicopter's speed increase to sixty, seventy, eighty, as the little lights and flashes underwater of the attack subs' torpedoes exploding illuminated the battle against the darkness of the Ark's aquatic shelf.


End file.
